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Sun Opens Up Enterprise Software
abscondment writes "Stating that "open source is the future" of the software industry, Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Sun will be opening its enterprise software in a manner similar to Solaris 10. Sun is opening up the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software, and Sun developer tools, etc. - practically everything except Java - hoping to lure more developers and chief executive officers worldwide to use and deploy its enterprise software."
What is going on with Sun? Why do they keep opening up things all over the board but ignoring the one thing that they have received the most demand to open up?
This is a great thing Sun is doing. I wouldn't argue with that. I just wish that they would open up Java also. If only.
And maybe FP? (literally)
The new x4100 servers look pretty sweet - dual core, dual proc Opteron 252 in a 1U low-power chassis. And N1 will work with RHEL as well, so long as it's on Sun hardware. It lets you do complete bare-metal installs from the OS up over the network and remote firmware patches, as well as the usual centralized patching and management. If you have to manage a bunch of similar machines, that's pretty nifty.
-EvilMagnus
But isn't one of the whole premises of open source that allowing everyone to look at the code is, in the long run, better than "security through obscurity?" This has always made sense to me. Also, wasn't that Nessus software everyone's been talking about open source until the current version? Besides, wouldn't Java developers have a strong incentive to keep compatibility with the installed base--let's not forget how massive that base is--even if Java did become open to change? Finally, if someone did fork Java and Java were under the GPL, all forks would be GPL also, so potential problems caused by this move would be minimal...
Sun is offering for free (as in beer) the same things that those that are going to pay for support for get with their support contracts. Sure, the free things come without timely feature patches, etc., but the barrier to using Sun software is defintely lowered. For those looking for free (libre) software from Sun, you can mostly get it too. OpenSolaris is an amazing step given the encumberances and continued business model that they had to struggle with. My guess is that most of Sun's customers will continue to pay for support even though they "don't need to." These customers tend to be the ones that believe that a Fortune 500 systems company is better prepared to deal with OS or other software problems than the outsourced IT department of a company that's core business is not software development. Those that get lured in by free beer have the option of switching to full support without changing software bits (unless they went to the libre bits).
With Red Hat, you can get for free (as in beer and freedom) almost the same bits as paying customers get. However, if you decide midstream that you need to switch from a free customer to a paying customer, you also need to change the code that you are running. This switch can be very costly because it disrupts your business.
It seems to me that this is an effort to pressure Red Hat into giving away RHEL. By reducing Red Hat's paying user base, Sun could put them on the ropes a bit. Again, those that feel that they really need support will still pay Red Hat.
Until Red Hat starts giving RHEL away for free, those that are simply going after the lowest (legal) cost of acquisition along with great ISV support and low risk have a clear choice in going with Solaris. This has the potential to at least slow the uptake of RHEL.
See the license for the new offering:
4. Your Service Provider Use is limited to a ratio of two hundred non-Employees for each Employee (200:1) accessing the Software.
If only someone from Sun would clarify the language, we'd know they're not pulling a MySQL on us.
If Sun were to GPL Java, they've have every Tom, Dick and Harry making an "improved platform independant language." They lose the marketshare, and browsers/websites have to start supporting a million little random Java-like applets.
You mean exactly like Python, Ruby, Perl and so on are suffering horribly from all their incompatible forks?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Java's source code is available for free. See http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/source_license.html .
"I want some software (security stuff) to stay closed-source forever"
The source isn't closed. It's not Free Software, but you can see it. I guess now this means you shouldn't use Java, seeing as all those evil hackers are gonna be rummaging through it.
And if you hadn't recalled, there already was a Java runtime from Microsoft. Wasn't compatible with Sun's Java. Doesn't exist anymore. Trademarks are sweet.
The package came, lovely yellow with the bubbly inside. "A CD-ROM!" I said aloud. "No better, I bet it's a DVD-ROM". I opened it up, popping layers of bubbles to find... a double-sided double-density 3 1/2 floppy. Confusion filled my mind as I pulled out my old 400mhz Pentium notebook.
I ran the included program, ENTSRC.EXE and up popped a window:
"Are you ready?"
"Yes!" I cried, hitting the Y key with orgasmic fervor.
"Are you truly ready for this?"
"Ohhhhh yessssss!" I moaned, banging the key again.
"Please read this EULA. Do you agree never to do anything nasty to Sun, never call it names, or mock Larry Ellison? Do you vow to besmirch .Net and Mono? Will you feed your cat only high-protein foods, and make love to your wife three times a week?"
"Anything!" I shouted, clicking Y one last time. And up it popped.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Looks pretty open to me. I can browse the source online or I can go download it.
And it's all under a license which is quite similar to the Mozilla Public License.
If you think this is "not very" open, could you be more specific about why and how?
It sounds like you are joking, but one can never tell here - you are joking, right?
sic transit gloria mundi
I can see where you're coming from, and honestly, it feels a bit like that to me as well. Sun didn't make their fortune on open source (although they have been involved with open software and open standards for quite some time), so I suspect the attitude towards it is mixed.
In fact, I recently went to an OpenSolaris users' group meeting at my local Sun facility, and one of the Sun people did mention that open sourcing Solaris was kind of a hard sell with the management, but that the "a rising tide benefits us all" argument did eventually win out. So, are they true believers? Undoubtedly, many Sun employees are, and surely some are skeptical. But even if 100% of them aren't behind it, you have to give them credit for being willing to try new things.
Now, on to the question of whether this is a Hail Mary. My own opinion is that if it were just this one thing in isolation, that wouldn't be a good sign. But, over the last year, Sun has done lots of things that kick ass. Solaris 10 kicks ass. ZFS, which they've just released, kicks ass[1]. (As the ZFS slides say, "ZFS Objective: End the Suffering", and that refers to the tedium of storage management on ALL platforms.) Sun is already working on projects and starting new projects to address shortcomings with Solaris on the desktop. Though they of course support gcc, the newest version of their own proprietary compiler (and dev environment), Sun Studio 11, is now free as in beer. And it's available for both Solaris and Linux, and pretty clearly generates better code on SPARC and is pretty competitive on x86.
Some of their new Opteron hardware is quite cool and cost competitive with similar Dell systems[2]. And they also have their 8-core, 4-simultaneous-hardware-thread Niagara chips.
The point is, like in years past, it can once again be said that Sun is doing cool stuff. So if you want to go with the football analogies, it could be a Hail Mary, or it could be that halftime has just ended, Sun has just studied the films to see what they need to adjust, and they're back on the field and ready to make something happen.
[1] Check out the (PDF) slides about it, or either of the two demos, or some of the other documentation.
[2] In fact, compare the cheapest 1U Dell server with the cheapest 1U Sun server. The Dell has a Celeron with 256KB cache in a server (!!!), and the Sun has an Opteron with 1MB cache. And the Sun is $745, whereas the Dell is $999. The only negative with the Sun is that it has no disk, but that option is $150, leaving it at $895, still over $100 cheaper than the Dell. Oh yeah, and the Sun hardware is qualified to run RHEL, SUSE Linux, Solaris 10, or Windows.
That's FUD. You can read the source of Java anytime. You can compile it and colaborate on the new versión (6.0). You can't distribute AFAIK. There is no obscurity, all is there.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Sun is the most significant Unix company in existence, which no one who knows anything about the Unix market and it's history can deny. What true Unix company still exists and is as true to Unix more than Sun? None. IBM, HP, DEC, SCO, SGI, etc. all lost to Sun during the dot com years. HP has HPUX on life support, no new innovation and no will left to survive. IBM talks up Linux because AIX is breathing its last breath. The rest are not even worth mentioning because they are either completely dead or will be any minute. How did things get to this point? Because Unix and the hardware designed to run Unix has been Sun's primary focus for which it has continued to develop, improve and campaign for relentlessly.
I am perplexed by the number of people posting FUD about Sun on slashdot. Who by their comments, clearly know nothing of Sun's financial situation or products. Sun is not going away anytime soon, even if they didn't sell a single new support contract or single new hardware device ever again, they would continue to exist. But that's just it, Sun has not given up (unlike its rivals), it is raising the bar and delivering on commitments.
I am getting really excited about the latest moves by Sun. Afterall, I only got involved with Linux because I couldn't afford to run a Solaris box for personal use. Do you think Linus would have ever been inspired to start working on Linux if he was able to run Solaris for free and it ran on his PC? I think not. And yes, much has changed since 1991 and Linux has certainly grown up. But what many fail to see is that Solaris has not been standing still. The gap certainly started closing rapidly around 2003 with the release of the 2.6 kernel. However, with Solaris 10, Sun leaped even further ahead. And I'm not talking about speed, reliability and scalability improvements, which it certainly had much of. Solaris 10 has features like DTrace, predictive self-healing, containers/zones, ZFS and more. These are completely new technologies. And unlike Linux, Sun's code comes out solid from the day it is released. If you're a developer, I urge you to go look at the source code and compare it to the typical Open Source project's code. I think you will see that the difference is like comparing a donkey to stallion.
Hopefully these words are not interpreted as being anti-Linux. I have dedicated a huge portion of my life during the last decade to Linux, its development and support. I feel ashamed to be part of a community that sees anything different as the enemy or a threat. The Linux community should not feel threatened by Sun or anyone else for that matter. The commercial entities that feed off our community however (IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) should be afraid, very afraid...