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Sun Steps Back from Linux JDS
chill writes "ZD Net UK is reporting that Sun is pulling back from their JDS desktop Linux initiative. The big question is what happened to those half-million to million-plus units that were supposed to ship in China in 2004? One hint may be that in April, Novell announced a deal with CSSC to 'cooperate to provide technology, services and marketing to optimise and promote Linux to the Chinese market.' Sun's JDS was based on SUSE Linux, now owned by Novell."
Is anyone surprised?
Say it isn't so. -- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
One hour later, they were hungry for Windows again.
Sun only supports linux because it is forced too. Sun developing for linux is ultimately counterproductive to its own long term future.
The big question is what happened to those half-million to million-plus units that were supposed to ship in China in 2004?
What about those of us here in the US who *paid* for JDS and were promised major upgrades every quarter? We saw the JDS 1.0 -> 2.0 upgrade, then it stopped while Sun worked on JDS/Solaris.
Sun needs to learn that the only way they're going to make inroads into the desktop market is if they follow through. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was the popularity of Java or Solaris. If Sun would take the time to listen to their customers and implement the features they are demanding, then they'd have a very good chance at success. *sigh*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Could someone clue me in?
Why won't Firefox render any images on Slashdot?
They work fine in IE, is Firefox doing something naughty?
Sco. They had they Linux and they pulled it off. Although I'm sure that Sun will ever put itself in Sco's position (wrong-doer to the open source movement).
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Obviously the mod wasn't paying attention to the article summary when he modded it down.
Gee, what's next? Inserting "in case mods didn't get it" guide after each joke?
What's the point of Sun wasting its time with a specific flavor of Unix for the desktop when Gnome is Unix neutral.
It makes sense for Sun to "sell" a linux solution in the server space if a customer wants it, but
let RedHat and Novell fight for the crumbs that is the linux desktop market and concentrate on your own OS.
That means the Gnome, Java-for-desktop-apps and Open Office efforts will keep on, and they'll switch kernels on the desktop offering.
davecb@spamcop.net
Works for me, in general.
Sun only supports linux because it is forced too. Sun developing for linux is ultimately counterproductive to its own long term future.
From a business viewpoint, you're probably right, if they want to keep selling what they're selling.
On the other hand, sometimes you have to transform the firm - just ask Groves about Intel changing from making memory to making CPUs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"The strategy has changed slightly." ...now we survive due to the colaboration with Microsoft, so see...they're not a big fan of Linux..and considering they've been taking people away from using our wonderful OS..err...we don't either...
Not when you consider Sun's maligning attitude towards all things purely Open (see Java, CDDL, etc). We've all seen the warnings against swimming in the JDS waters for ages now.
Maybe Sun and Microsoft have made a pledge to just be honest with us from now on? Maybe they've abandonned they're FUDdy ways? Maybe.
More likely that Sun realised they could not tread open source waters and eat their cake too.
Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda
This is what the highly hyped partnership is all about
One step forward,
One step backward
Till the end...
In other news SUN announces new solaris will be closed source...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
If there's one thing that's a reported definite in Sun, it is that they've decided on GNOME for their desktop environment on Solaris sometime in the near future.... I think JDS was a nice experiment at rebranding of both Suse and GNOME software, but never really a serious product with R&D devoted to improving software upstream from it. To make matters more complex, Suse joining the Novell fold has made a mess of the Suse and Ximian desktop offerings. Novell up top seems to be aiming for a losely defined linux services platform in the mold of IBM, not a strongly defined Linux desktop and distribution product. No reason they should go for the later either, since that market is decently covered by other products from other companies.
So, Sun had JDS which is derived from a distrtibution (Suse) that is not nice to GNOME (wtg, germans), and are giving up on it. No biggie, IMHO.
Why wasn't I told about this? I swear if I lose another grand from this SUN company I am going to sell. O.o
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But I noticed a recurring trend. It seems companies jump on the Linux desktop bandwagon only to jump off afterwards? Even the BIG guys (IBM, Novell, SUN, SGI, Corel, etc) have had a crack at it and still no fireworks. Don't ya think it's time we just focus on some other system, or perhaps develop something new. Even the BSD's have made it to the desktop (MacOS) with more success than Linux. It's no surprise, look at the licensing differences. Let it go people. Let it go.
It makes sense too. They have a world class Unix based OS and it made little sense for them to just abandon it and move to Linux. If they are able to generate some interest in an open source Solaris, that might be a more sensible path forward for them
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Sun is acquiring SeeBeyond for $387 Million. I guess they're pushing back to the server-side.
Seriously it wasn't the best stuff they had ever done.
... but it wasn't.
I was once given the choice of a linux distro for my job and I gave it a try. It was incredible how they suceeded to slow down Linux. At first I thougt that everything was done in JAVA
It was as if they had slowed down linux to make the java applications look faster than they really are.
Beside the support you could get from Sun if you bought it, IMHO from a user perspective it was really a piece of sh.. .
Does Sun's pulling back on the JDS initiative have anything to do with the recent Microsoft/Sun lovefest? Could this be the removal of a competitor to desktop Windows in China and elsewhere?
Just maybe, this will create an opportunity for a larger number of consumers to consider a move to alternatives such as Linux.
me too ;-)
(in konq)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
> Sun's JDS was based on SUSE Linux, now owned by Novell.
/. is so what misleading again. It hurts SUSE instead as it should correctly have been mentioned out that it hurts GNOME even more. First HP stepped back from GNOME and now SUN steps back from it as well.
I think it should have correctly been mentioned that JDS was based on the GNOME Desktop since it's their Desktop strategy they want to step back from. The article on
...explain to Scott McNealy the meaning of the adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"
Pulling JDS because its runs on SUSE Linux makes about as much sense as Sun's decision to piddle around with eDirectory (then NDS) and not actually implement it on Solaris (this after Novell *gave* them the source code for the purpose of putting NDS on Solaris).
Eventually Novell got tired on Sun sitting on its thumbs and took it all back and did it themselves. Another opportunity lost by Sun.
I *like* Sun. I use a lot of their hardware and I cut my UNIX sysadmin teeth on SunOS and Solaris. But its getting disheartening watching them stumble from one stupid decision to another. Which is *another* reason I'm sharpening my Linux skills.
Sun was never and never will be a supporter of Linux.
Anybody who thought the Java Desktop was a "real" Linux distro is nuts. Sun is a proprietary UNIX shop and never will be anything more.
They're doomed. Flee from their products (except Java which is being open-sourced whether they like it or not) like the plague.
"Open" Solaris will never develop the community Linux has, and Linux will match and exceed Solaris' capabilities within five years.
Sun is the "new" SCO. In five years, they'll be suing Linus for "copyright and patent violations".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It's no surprise, look at the licensing differences
I'm not sure why the kernel's licensing need be relevant to the creation of a desktop system?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
All the little consumer desktops seem to be merging with Mandriva so this is just one more shake out of the desktop space.
I fail to see how it's flamebait - where's the million plus desktops in China?
Oh my God, I've replied to my own comment!
...didn't we? It's amazing how some people actually trusted Sun to follow through with this. It was deemed obvious that Sun would pull the Linux version in favor of Solaris version sooner or later, especially as people observeh how they downplayed the significance of kernel.
It's not like I'm totally neurotic about the choice of kernel now that both are open - but Solaris is open more in principle rather than practice, because it's only developed & supported by one company. Others could join in, but it would still be Sun's kernel, while Linux is more of a shared effort.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Solaris x86 got ressurected to reverse declining sales of low-end servers, and when Opteron came along, S10 went 64-bit on x86, and got support for commodity hardware (NICs, graphics cards, laptop chipsets).
What with Solaris x86 running better than Linux on the desktop (and laptop), and in 64 bits, there ceased to be any need to sustain JDS on Linux.
A kernel is a kernel. It's cheaper to support and develop on one (Solaris) than on two (Solaris and Linux).
Sun's PHBs have been making some really bad decisions recently. Earlier this year, they RIF'd the Janus engineering team (in-kernel Linux emulation for Solaris) before it had been put into Solaris proper. They said it would be in Solaris by about now. Then they said maybe in a year's time. Now they are saying not at all and that Xen virtualisation would be a better solution... So much for Janus and Zones^H^H^H^H^HContainers.
And what about ZFS? The Zettabyte File System that was going to be lightyears ahead of the competition. Where is that? That was supposed to be in Solaris 10 as well.
And then they bought StorageTek... and then they RIF'd yet more people.
Did Bill Gates pay Scott McNeally to kill Sun?
Stick Men
It is sad to see Sun, once again, changing their strategy like a blade of grass in the wind.
I admire their guts to try new things, but as a corporate customer I am losing patience.
They are a mature company who seem to change their toys every 2nd quarter. We need to see a stable direction. My advice is that they either push their own OpenSolaris HARD, or that they buy a Linux vendor like RedHat and make a solid commitment to linux, and pull in revenues. Chopping and changing is doing nobody any favours.
My last project we used Sun's Access Manager for albertsons. Why? Because Sun gave it to us for FREE to compete with Siteminder. To this day we have not paid 1 cent for the Access Manager or any of the software support. If sun is going to pull a switch-er-roo and charge us.. well we will just get more H1-bs from India and deploy the next latest and greatest Web access mgmt. software.
Sun is doomed as they are giving things away for free expecting the customers to be "WOW we need to by this hardware" to bad as the customers are instead looking to use their already existing hardware with linux or cheap linux commodity boxes in a cluster as the performance and dollar gained is HIGH.
The sun has set, they are just kicking around ashes now.
If you look at JDS it really contained a lot of rebranded KDE and Gnome components to "create" a desktop system replete with things like OpenOffice. Sun's best strategy is to promote Solaris as it is by far the stronger operating system. I know everyone will scream Linux, but Solaris is military grade and important companies (like our banks) trust much more than any Linux distro. While I use both, I don't particularly care for JDS. As I said, it's a hack of KDE/Gnome and not really worth mentioning. If you really want open source on Solaris you can never trust Sun's distro - you need something like blastwave.org or compile yourself. Personally, I'll stick with KDE on Solaris. Works for me.
WHat with Evo, the whole Ximian and Suse engineering crowd plus a directory service, groupwware and remote management system, it seems pretty end to end to me.
Now that we're finally out from under Microsoft Office, we don't want to be in a similar position with Sun. Users don't want Sun to be in a position to change the rules at a future time. That's the whole point of open source.
That hardly comes as a surprise: JDS was more of an attempt by Sun to take over the Linux desktop rather than to contribute to it. One can debate whether Swing is a good toolkit, but it clearly isn't a Linux-native desktop toolkit.
...) have annoyed open source developers. Given its history, Java is largely dead on the Linux desktop.
Java could have become an important part of the Linux desktop, but only based on an open source implementation of the Java language (most likely, gcj) and only based on native Gtk+ or Qt bindings.
However, uncertainty about the legal status of Java has tained Java, and public comments by Sun management (McNealy, Schwartz,
On a related note, IBM has, contrary to your claim of "jumping off", just posted an article detailing the changes they will be contributing to Linux to take full advantage of the astonishing horsepower of the Cell chip.
STFU about slashdot bias.
Sun really just re-allocating it's resources. After all the the components of JDS are OSS to begin with. Looking Glass and Star Office are both OSS to one degree or another. The real question is Sun's mindshare gaining traction...?? The big problem is that Sun has always had problems making it's software into a business revenue generator.
How many times is Sun going to start a Linux initiative, then change their mind? There must have been four or five of these in the last few years.
They can't decide if Linux is an opportunity or a competitive threat.
The answer: It doesn't matter. You guys are doing a great job of killing your company all by yourself.
Who's steering that ship anyway?
The parent contains a fragment of the sentence from John Loicono which led to this FUD fest. (Now John probably knows how Alan Greenspan feels.) Such sillyness. I can tell you that Sun has no plans to walk away from its customers, nor plans to drop the JDS linux product nor plans to drop the Solaris Java desktop. There will probably be more focus on Solaris and OpenSolaris. This makes sense too, Sun's traditional customers demand the kind of enterprise class tools, documentation, support and API stability you will not yet find in linux distros. JDS linux was and AFAIK will continue to be available for those who have a reason to run a linux kernel under their desktop, but the reasons to run linux are diminishing. Sun shouldn't throw money at linux to the detriment of Solaris, especially when some linux advocates insist on attacking Sun regardless of how much it contributes to the opensource world. If I didn't know better (and I don't), I'd swear this FUDfest was orchestrated by one or more of Sun's competitors.
Sun has made so much noises how THEIR distribution of Linux is true to the LInux spirit whereas Red Hat isn't - I've never doubt their linux campaign won't last that long. Just another half-backed marketing idea which boils down to bait and switch. Except it smelled fishy for me right from the start, and I guess for many others as well.
This comment reminded me of Star Control 2, where the Chenjesu and Mmrhmrhm(?) merge to form the Chmmr Avatar (great fighter ship btw). If the combination had the stability of Solaris (or so I've heard, never used Solaris myself) and the a good GUI like Windows which is nice for newbies; that might be an interesting combination. But on the other hand, there is this apocryphal story (as much as I remember of it): A woman wrote a letter to George Bernard Shaw - "I am beautiful and you are a genius. Let's get married, our children will be good-looking as well as intelligent." GBS reportedly wrote back - "What if they inherited my looks and your brains?" (or something to that effect :D )
I have used Solaris yes, but not very much. I was just going on my initial reaction to it.
Your post was by far the best out of all the replies. Very informative, thank you.
We had a presentation from some Sun guys, and they basically spent the entire session apologising for the fact that JDS didnt offer the latest packages e.g. 'if youre looking for the latest and greatest, JDS won't give it to you'.
I mean, why even bother doing it if youre going to settle for half-assed - and then tell your customers upfront you want them to pay for half-assed...
Needless to say nobody present left the meeting feeling very excited about where Sun was going with JDS.
Personally, I think dumping Linux is an understandable move in the larger scheme of things - ultimately Solaris is the OS that Sun wants to see succeed, but signalling a lack of support in the JDS offering is baffling.
There is absolutely no reason why JDS shouldnt run on OpenSolaris and offer the same experience as Linux - it seems that Sun, having finally come to the realisation that an old version of GNOME (which is hardly flawless in it's latest iteration) is a tough sell, especially when compared side-by-side with highly polished offerings from Microsoft and Apple.
So, instead of doing something about the obvious flaws in their product - Or god forbid come up with something better - they publically throw in the towel, with a vague suggestion that they might decide to have another half-assed attempt at it in future.
I mean, GNOME and the rest of the Linux desktop is going to improve and will compete head-on with the best that the rest have to offer, and the day will come when Sun will have to try and re-enter the market with a revised offering and explain away this flip-flopping, which isn't going to be at all easy.
Does nobody at Sun get that this is a pathetic, embarrassing show of weakness?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
2005: Linux is dead!
2004: Linux is dead!
2003: Linux is dead!
2002: Linux is dead!
2001: Linux is dead!
2000: Linux is dead!
1999: Linux is dead!
1998: Linux is dead!
1997: Linux is dead!
etc
I think we all can agree that Sun's attitude towards Linux has been schizophrenic at best. On one hand they sell a wide range of linux based products, and yet on the other they give funds to SCO.
Funnily enough I have no problem with Sun wanting to use Linux in their product range, nor in fact do I have a problem with the license they released OpemSolaris under, what I have a problem with is the constant stream of "We love Linux"/"Linux is run by commo hippies". Settling on a position for longer than six months would be a good idea I am thinking.
No wonder, have you ever looked at JDS? It is useless, at least when selling it as a windows replacement.
If you would just look at what the guys at Ximian were doing at the same time as Sun released JDS, you would see the difference in end quality and integration from miles away.
Perhaps after a few years JDS could have grown into something good. I did not RTFA so it could be they are continuing it on Solaris, it wouldn't even matter, AFAIK nobody in the community was promoting it anyway.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Theyre not announcing renewed efforts around a Solaris-kernel JDS, theyre trying to dump the whole idea.
I care nothing for the Solaris vs Linux argument, its just irrelevant. The problem for Sun is they made a desktop product, which was generally poor all-round:
bad timing (they could have waited until OpenSolaris was released),
bad conception (No Java in the 'Java Desktop System'),
bad implementation (rebadging SuSE is not that hard, and the result was just plain unimpressive),
bad execution (Suns 'first, let me apologise for how sh*t this thing is' marketing), and now,
no support whatsoever (Sun 'backing away' from the product).
I mean, spare me the pointless 'But OpenSolaris is awesome' argument because I dont see what it has to do with Sun not being able to roll out a useful desktop offering.
Thats the display of weakness i'm talking about, it has nothing to do with the techical or licensing merits of Solaris at all.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
In essence, the deal between MS and sun is the closest MS can come to buying Sun (imagine what would have happened if they had tried to buy it, a monopolist can't catch a brake these days)
This news does not come as a suprise. It was all a part of their plan to weaken the open source movement. After all, three weak camps are better then one strong (and one not so strong, I'm not saying BSD here, mark my words) at least for MS and Unix vendors.
Opensolaris will never be a viable alternative to Linux, It is created by a vendor who has an interest in selling Operating systems, and therefore there will allways be some app that they "can't" include in the open version because of "licensing issues". Eventually openSolaris will be as useful as freedos is for windows XP appications.
I see Sun now as a beached whale on an antarctic beach, stuck because it keeps eating the pinguins trying to help it, Sooner or later the sun will set.
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
pEnguins, not pInguins.