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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."
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 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.
Not only can you see it, but you can build it, tweak it, and even deploy it within your company. You simply can't distribute it.
This gives most of the freedoms of OSS, but keeps the core stable and consistent within the hand of Sun.
I'm not sure if you can distribute patches freely, however (BSD does, but they're different and have a relationship with Sun already).
Save for the most technical pedant, Java is "Free enough".
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...