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Sun Puts its Weight Behind Ubuntu Linux
fak3r writes "Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now, with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town."
Remember this quote from Scott Mcnealy a few years back?
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Nope, you are wrong. Ubuntu/Canonical offers 5 years of support for "Dapper Drake" as a server. Only because you don't consider it at Desktop OS (like lots of other people, including me) it is not unusable on a server.
Sun is endorsing Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system. There isn't anything indicating that they are favouring any particular software packaging system. Dpkg/apt-get might be the way Ubuntu keeps its own house in order but nothing prevents anyone from installing and maintaining RPM packages on a machine running Ubuntu.
;-)
Merits of dpkg aside, SUN may give standards compliance a high priority in its products, and like it or not in order to comply with ISO23360 the operating system MUST support the installation and management of RPMs (it need not be the native package system of the OS, but ALL ISO23360 compliant applicaitons are distributed as RPM packages). SUN could very likely contribute its resources towards making Ubuntu comply with ISO23360. Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that this was a goal for upcoming Ubuntu releases so they would be on the same page. Therefore if the ISO23360 standard gains traction it could mean that installing RPMs on Ubuntu machines could become more common than you'd think, especially for companies like my employer--large enterprises that salivate over anything with "ISO##### Compliant" on it...and guess what SUN's customer base is?
Oh yeah...perhaps I should explain what this ISO23360 is. Basically it is a standard that specifies a set of requirements for Linux-based OSes (file structures, included shared libraries, software packaging format, etc) to allow compliant application software to be easily deployed and executed on any compliant OS without the need to recompile and/or re-package for each OS as is the case today with Linux systems. It is more commonly known as LSB3.1
Perhaps we'll see a repository for Java .debs at last, eh?
You must have missed the big news: official packages of Sun Java .debs were uploaded into Debian's non-free archive yesterday.
The announcement
Link to the page for the "source" package (I put "source" in quotes since it actually contains tarballs of the binaries, but you can obtain real source code in the sun-java5-source binary Debian package.)
License and FAQ about the license under which these packages are made available (note in particular that it permits sublicensing for derived distributions).
- Kevin B. McCarty
Non-Debian users will think you're joking, but the truth is that Debian packages are several orders of magnitude better than any other distro's. Slackware may come closest. I think the difference is that Debian packages feel like they've been made by people who love Debian and love the software they're packaging for Debian. There are no bad packages in Debian stable and packages don't do anything they're not supposed to do, like break compatibility.
Debian is the only OS I use in which I feel confident upgrading a production server without extensive testing. 100 packages might need upgrading, but I know it will work and won't break anything.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
What will Ubuntu provide over Debian for a server?
Commercial Support.
"/dev/rdsk/c0t0sUpercalifragilistic" is actually a SysV4 standard. HP or IBM would do the same.
Partly, it's a matter of timing. When Progeny started, it was 2000. Perhaps the height of the .com bubble. There were a lot of competitors to Debian. Redhat was still officially supporting a free desktop OS. GNOME hadn't yet recieved a critical look via a Usability study that demonstrated that half the crap in it was not only useless, but confusing. Distributing an .iso was feasible but finding software to burn them was still arcane. Crappy modem support was still a fundamental problem. A notable constants though: Debian stable was two years old, and woudn't be out for another year.
.com crash.
By the time Ubuntu came out, Fedora had taken (and partly dropped) the torch, GNOME was vastly improved, KDE wasn't in danger of being placed in non-free, and a lot of Linux providers dropped out after the
The other half of the equation was simple: goals. Shuttleworth aims to be truly successful, not just something to feed himself and his kids (*cough* his progeny *cough*). He capitalized on the fact that Debian stable was so sorely out of date that when everyone else stated they'd not be packaging xfree 4.4, debian had just gotten 4.3 into unstable. Ubuntu's release schedule is (usually) designed to be synchronized with GNOME so that, for a brief moment, Ubuntu is one of two places to go for the latest (the second being CVS). Shuttleworth recognized that a number of people didn't have access to windows based CD burning software, or perhaps the knowhow to find some, and funded ShipIt.
While Murdock was aiming for NOW (network of workstations), Ubuntu's initial focus was on laptop support. Even in 2000, the question was asked "why do you think your SSI will succeed in today's environment?" If the answer was "it's open source," well that answer clearly wasn't adaquate. NOW assumes a very specific kind of resources, and adds a lot of complexity to gain something that rapidly falls in price. It might be interesting, but you have to own more than a couple workstations to make it worth your time, and it doesn't really aid mysql or apache much.
It almost seems like Canonical learned from Progeny that half of selling Debian support was going to be making people want it, instead of capitalizing on some imaginary underserved market segment looking for ways to reduce the cost of Debian deployment. As always, sales, sales, sales!
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