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Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source"
An anonymous reader sends along a video from Builder AU, in which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps describes 2001-2002 as 'a period where Sun 'screwed up' in their dealings with the open source community. Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
Thank you Sun for all the great products that you have open sourced. Unlike your competitors, you have outsourced your crown jewels.
Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!
How about the other years? or is 2001-2002 the period they screwed up the worst ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
good to hear about sun's mistakes , especially from a top management guy at Sun.keep along this line and will be ok.good luck!
I am still skeptical of Sun. They are coerced into behaving nicely by the huge open source community which is not that much interested in what they have to offer anymore and have a lot of influence in the market. And let's face it, they opened up Java after IcedTea is out for quite a while now.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Just finish open sourcing Java, and then bring JRuby and Jython up to par with the latest versions of the C-based versions. Oh and throw in there a spec to allow easy integration of those languages into JSP and some other areas to make them peers to Java itself in the enterprise world.
They restored some respect that they lost from me. Lets see how it goes from here.
To be fair they wanted to open source the code in Q4 1999, however their Java ftp client just finished loading a few months ago so they couldn't upload the code until just now.
You have failed me for the last time!
I honestly don't understand how open-sourceing Java, a 'free' 'compiler' will help a struggling company. While it's true that java runs many devices, these are always closed-course customized versions of the java interpreter, so the famour 'write once , run anywhere' becomes, 'write once - debug everywhere'.
It's a great learning language, like Turing was back in the 80's-90's or so, and it can be used to teach the basics of OOP and OOP compiler design.
How they EVER planned to make money off java, is beyond me, [well, maybe the embedded versions]. This should have been open-source from the start.
I appreciate how much effort it must have taken for Sun to move this far on open source. Nevertheless, I think Sun is still screwing up.
Solaris, for example, is being positioned as an alternative to Linux: it's "pick us or pick Linux". From an open source point of view, it would be better if Sun picked a license that allowed the best parts of Solaris and Linux to be combined, and for end users to decide what those best parts are.
For Java, Sun still has most of the control, they have torpedoed attempts to certify Apache-licensed implementations as Java compliant, and their dual licensing scheme for Sun Java means that the project just isn't run the way an open source project ought to be run.
In the short term, Sun's behavior is disruptive for open source, but sadly not in the positive newspeak sense, but in the sense of merely annoying a lot of people for no good reason.
In the long term, Sun is going to lose with Solaris and Java if they persist in their take-it-or-leave-it approach to open source. If they want the technologies to survive in some form, they need to allow a mix-and-match approach; that's what open source is really all about.
Ponytail-guy and his pals have basically given away the crown jewels and have not been able to "monetize" any sort of decent return for their efforts.
And what brilliant strategy would you have recommended? What should they have "monetized" and how?
So Sun decides that they can't make money by pushing the open source community around, so now they come on their knees and beg forgiveness before they have anymore problems.
/me wraps his arm around Sun's shoulder
Hmm...
It's alright man. Good to have you with us.
Sun has, and has had, some great products in the past, and some of their hardware is still pretty excellent, but the problem with the company is that they still have a deep rooted protectionist attitude towards SPARC and Solaris. Why do you think it took so long to get Solaris on x86, why it took so long for Sun to accept that x86 servers was where the growth was, why most of Sun's customers still get Linux pre-installed on Sun's systems and why Sun paid a couple of billion for an excellent business opportunity in Cobalt, and then promptly destroyed it?
If they could make Solaris and SPARC stand out and pay off then fine, but they can't hence the half-hearted and pretty sad move to 'open source' Solaris just so all their consultants and execs can run around trying to tell us that it's 'just like Linux'. However, in the cold hard light of day, Linux ate Solaris's lunch, and SPARC just competes too closely with x86 based servers without the comparable performance. SPARC is so inferior to x86 in terms of raw performance it's so laughable. Solaris also suffers from the fact that Sun just don't have the resources to push development to where Linux and other operating systems are, and these days it is increasingly expensive to try and maintain an entire OS yourself.
In terms of open source, Sun's problem is that the vast majority of open source software is written for Linux and the BSDs first. No one thinks of Solaris as their first platform of consideration, and it's difficult to see why they should do so now. It's still like that now, and it was still like that a few years ago when a former employer scratched its head trying to work out why Zope and Python performance was so terrible on Solaris and an UltraSPARC. A Sun guy even recompiled Python in Forte. The bottom line answer we got from the Python devs was "We use open source systems, and possibly Windows, first and foremost on x86 systems, x86 and Linux performs better anyway, and while we'd like to help, we just don't care about your corner case problem on an OS and hardware we don't have access to and can't reproduce. Just use Linux and x86". That's not literal, but it's the general gist, and I couldn't say I blamed them.
The solution? They moved to a far cheaper x86 system with Linux, they had no installation problems with Python as it came within the package management system itself, things were far easier to manage, performance increased exponentially which pleased everyone and Python and Zope ran with no issues whatsoever. That still holds true today.
Look at this post here from Groklaw, reviewing the testimony from the SCO v Novell trial.
PJ notes that SCO enacted a license, illegally according to Novell, with Sun in 2003 that allowed Sun to open source Unix Sys V. Knowing they had that, Sun still allowed SCO to embark on their SCOSource campaign against IBM and Linux users for allegedly putting Sys V code into Linux.
I think they screwed themselves. I am happy to see they are changing their minds and hope that is not too late.
Reading this story seem to indicate that 2003 and forward should have been part of the "screw up" period.
It is good to see Sun throw their weight in to support open source.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Yeah, they screwed up big time. Groklaw has a nice article up on their involvement with SCO:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080625020853732
And they are still screwing up. Just have a look at the legal agreement you need to agree to when downloading even the *specification* from any of the Java Community Process groups where the project lead works for Sun. Evil and completely unacceptable terms for open-source developers...
And in those projects where they have released the source under a free license, they still keep an iron hand on the development process. So unless you work for sun, you need to beg to get your changes in (and sign all sorts of agreements). Closed bug-reporting systems. Version-control repositories that you need to apply to get read-only access to. Closed mailing lists. Design meetings held in person (Sun employees only of course).
This is a company that has a *long* way to go before they understand what Open Source is about.
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system. Yes, once the source is released a fork is then possible, but for a large project inertia and an existing pool of developers all from one company make that something that takes real anger to do. So the changes Sun has made so far don't achieve a whole lot; they still completely control the direction their open-source projects take.
Real OSS companies are different; they contribute upstream, allow derivatives downstream, and are open in their process. A whole world of difference. See RedHat for a good example.
I assume you're talking about VB.NET?
VB.NET is the braindead version of C#; the two languages map almost directly onto each other, though VB.NET is gimped with trash like the My namespace. Pick up C# and get away from that VB nonsense and Java will come easily to you as well.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Visual BASIC is a RAD environment. Unless you're using Java in a similar environment (Visual J++ maybe? I never used that and don't think they even make it anymore) then it's going to feel a bit different. FWIW, I transitioned into Java from BASIC (but the flat text file variety) and didn't have much trouble, though the concept of OO programming was a bit of a change (not hard to grasp though).
I will say from personal experience that despite liking the concept of RAD environments a lot, I now find the BASIC language (and hence VB) simple, but very, very limiting. C or C++ in the background is far more powerful, which is why for a long time I really liked Borland C++ Builder, which was a more or less a VB-esque app but with C++ as the background language. These days Visual C+ can work the same way (in the "old days" it didn't let you draw your interface like VB did), making it more attractive. I'm attempting to pick up C# along the way, but it's just a project in my spare time. On the Linux front, Glade is useful and I've played around with it a bit, but it's not quite at the same level of polish as Microsoft's developer tools.
As to VB dying, it's only dying in the same way that COBOL is dying. That is to say, it's not really considered a front runner for new application development, but there's still TONS of stuff out there still being sold, and still being maintained, so it IS a good skill to have.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Sure, Simon Phipps's quote makes a good headline, but between OpenOffice.org, Netbeans, Glassfish, slowly but surely Java, etc. I would personally give Sun a good grade.
Open Source can be good for business, huge, large, and small. A bit off topic, but: while I earn most of my living consulting on (unfortunately) closed source projects, I almost always try to initially talk my customers into at least considering Open Sourcing all or parts of development projects. I believe that software development should be done in the least expensive and highest quality way possible: better for almost everyone to drive down the cost of software development; I argue that the less expensive that useful projects are, then more projects get funded. Also, about an hour ago, I received a small grant from someone in Europe to convert one of my LGPL projects from Java to Pascal/Delphi :-)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
and speak about the deal with MS to fund SCO. When you pay 10 million for software that is worth at most 200K, and you obtain a big chunck of stock, well, that is not about a set of drivers. And let not just the OSS world know about that, but some of the regulatory groups.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I currently maintain some software here at work and you've guessed it - most of it is implemented in vb, vb.net, vbscript and asp.
I have also used c, c++ and c# in other projects in my working career.
Almost all computer languages have common underpinnings and principles (e.g. conditional statement, local/global scoped variables & loop constructs) when you know the basic (no pun intended) elements of a language - this rest will follow.
Personally I always get to grips with the core elements of a language and ensure I have a good foundation to build on before I start on the libraries.
For me, the libraries are the most 'challenging' aspect of learning a new language.
Once you've got your head round the libraries you will find it much easier to solve problems.
I've recently started Java programming again and feel almost overwhelmed at the sheer size of just the core libraries in Java.
It's a worthwhile investment in time and energy because Java is pretty much implemented everywhere and of course now open-sourced.
Stay at it and good luck!
I give Star Division all the credit for Star Office.
Sure, Sun decided to come along after it was pretty much finished
and but it out and then give it away. However, it was the Germans
that actually built it from the ground up and gave us something
useful. They had the vision and the interest in creating the thing
in the first place. They chose to support us.
It wasn't 'ideal' in terms of free software zealotry but they were
there at the table with us at least showing us enough respect to
acknowledge us.
Giving Sun the main credit for Star Office is like saying that Gates invented the internet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You say that you had to install OpenSSH to manage the system from your Kubuntu laptop; SSH has come by default with a regular Solaris install since Solaris 9 (SUNWssh*). Maybe you had a specific reason not to use this and to use OpenSSH?
If we stick to strictly common server configurations, where most of the time Solaris x86 is intended to be used, I don't think the hardware support is all that terrible. Linux does have a vastly larger device support in general, such desktop equipment and legacy hardware, but a *guess* would be that for current, popular server systems sold by major vendors (Sun, HP, Dell, IBM), Solaris x86 support shouldn't be that bad. Even IBM now supports Solaris x86 on it's blades. VMware supports Solaris x86, too.
Anybody who has ever tried to do AWT, Swing, or SWXML knows the pain of just trying to lay out any form with even modest complexity. I remember VB4 back in 1994 did much better at this than even the
tools of today.
http://madbean.com/anim/totallygridbag
I write decent Visual Basic code and I am quite adept with OOP, but still find writing Java code quite hard. Is it the case for Java folks out there too?
Well I can only speak for myself, but no, I don't find Java hard. Then again I've used a variety of different languages casually, academically and professionally over the last 25 years and I've never had much trouble picking up a new one (that sounds rather grander than it really is - for much of the first 11 years of that I was only programming very occasionally indeed; my professional work began a little over 9 years ago)
Also as others have said VB is no more dying than C or C++ are; there will be plenty of work at least maintaining existing code for a good few years. You can still find COBOL jobs if you look hard enough (and Fujitsu has released COBOL.NET!)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I would say this is the single biggest screw up that Sun have made on the open source front. Had they put WABI on an open source license then the effort that has gone into Wine would have started with a mostly functioning version, and would have given people a real OS choice over a decade before it became one for most people.
I would also cite the failure to opensource the XView desktop as another mistake.
I got Jython working on my new machine, and it's considerably better. Like, almost on par with CPython - modulo the fact that it's still quite behind feature-wise. It might be the JVM (1.5 before vs 1.6 now) helping. Also, IronPython has gotten worse at generators between Alpha6 and Beta2 somehow.
Test machine is 2GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB SDRAM running MacOS 10.5.3.
awatts@platypus:~$ python2.5 timerseqs.py
2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:17)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)]
forStatement => 4.59940099716
listComprehension => 2.38550591469
mapFunction => 1.92037510872
generatorExpression => 3.14438390732
awatts@platypus:/Applications/IronPython-2.0B2$ mono ipy.exe ~/timerseqs.py .NET 2.0.50727.42)
2.5.0 (IronPython 2.0 Beta (2.0.0.2000) on
forStatement => 9.48001098633
listComprehension => 6.89910125732
mapFunction => 5.57528686523
generatorExpression => 19.7973022461
Note: Jython doesn't support generator comprehensions ./jython ~/timerseqs.py
(With Java 1.6.0)
awatts@platypus:~/jython2.2.1$
2.2.1
forStatement => 6.0929999351501465
listComprehension => 3.7769999504089355
mapFunction => 1.6570000648498535
I hear the upper management takes a lot of LDS. Some of them have been dropping it since the early 80s.
In other words, Sun realizes that it failed to learn the lesson Netscape learned: when your product is so hopelessly buggy, poorly designed, and is tanking in the marketplace... you would have to be insane to not want legions of fools to fix it for free! It's not like Netscape could have gotten WORSE, since it's quality had long before hit rock bottom and just kept going. And now look! Firefox actually has a chance to "win" as a free browser, whereas it completely failed as a money-making piece of software! It's a whole new economy!
So now, maybe Sun's Java can become the latest polished turd in the FOSS stable. It was insane of them to stand in the way of that- they should have been handing out chamois to the legions of people willing to work for free. It's even better than outsourcing!
Linus picked the GPL on purpose, that was his choice. In doing so he intentionally chose to refuse to share his code with anyone unless they were also going to use the GPL. How is it Sun's fault that linux is under a very restrictive and selfish license? And why do linux people complain now when they can't take code from Sun, while they've been taking BSD code for years and not sharing anything back to the BSD people? Hipocrytical much?
Maybe he did a little too much LDS back in college?
Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.
But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.
Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.
Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.
There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.
Go buy some hardware from them. Sheesh, I mean how cool are the Sparc CPU systems.
Everybody out there complaining about Sun needing to open-source this or that, should take some time to consider what they would do in return!
Next time you need a new, heavy duty workstation or server, checkout Sun's offerings - rocksolid engineering, excellent price performance.
We all know Sun made mistakes, and like in all human endeavours they will likely make some more, at least they are trying to innovate and share - it's up to you to participate.
As I sit here at work reading this, I have a spreadsheet minimized in my nice and free ( as in beer) Open Office. Need I say more.
I thought that Sun paid a lot of money for StarOffice, and then Sun open sourced it.
Isn't this right?
"I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron"
They're considered overpriced now, but the reason Sun (and DEC as well) hit the big time in the first place was because their products were far cheaper, but just as reliable, as Big Iron products from IBM/Sperry/Burroughs/etc. It's not so much that Sun got greedy as X86, Windows Servers, and Linux came and changed the marketplace the same way SunOS and Sparc servers did.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
First of all, the question is not why they didn't use the GPL, but why they didn't use one of the many GPL-compatible licenses.
Second, a license that prevented programs from running on GNU/Linux would (by definition) not be an Open Source license.
Third, I suspect the GPL is the Open Source license *most* court-tested.
Fourth, Linux's GPL license does not prevent any codec from running on it. It's the authors of the codecs and patent holders that do that.
And finally, the GPL hurts Linux's stability? Truly it is a powerful license, but I never imagined that it had such capabilities...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I think they made a mistake. IBM doesn't open source everything. Unless I missed it, their mainframe OS and AIX are still closed source, and it hasn't hurt them. Face it, most really profitable IT products involving software have at least a degree of exclusivity. If you give away the store, what's left to sell? Thus far only Red Hat has managed to make significant money selling services, and even they accomplished that by introducing a level of exclusivity, namely by making it very very hard for the average user to get a whole copy of RHEL without paying for it; they make you go through a song and dance to get the code, and then you have to compile it all. So technically they're free, but not practically.
It's a shame too, because Sun's latest line of Sparc processors are simply outstanding. They don't have record breaking clock speed, but in work-per-clock-cycle, and in work-per-watt, the new Sparcs are really outstanding. They also had some really good product ideas in their emergency-mobile computing areas... putting instant server farms in truck containers, for instance.
While "giving away the store" has hurt them, I also think their current leadership has hurt them as well. Paying 1 billion dollars for MySQL? Are you kidding? When Jonathan Schwartz was bumped to the top office, it was said that there was a collective "what the???" at Sun. I think his performance since then has only reinforced that.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
According to this Sun may still not be honestly supportive of FOSS:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080625020853732
This says that Sun already had the rights to open source SYSV even when SCO sued IBM for open sourcing SYSV technology (which didn't actually happen) into Linux. Yet Sun stood by and said nothing.
Perhaps they are secretly hoping Linux will get stomped so that Solaris can make a comeback?
It seems more and more that you just can't trust anyone and that Sun isn't and probably never will be as FOSS friendly as they would have us believe.
In 2000-2001
1. They screwed up by announcing the end of line for Solaris on X86
2. They screwed up by refusing to offer X86 hardware.
3. They screwed up by not offering Linux on any of their hardware
4. They screwer up by not open sourcing Java, Solaris, and other goodies.
In the end, they are trying to correct all those errors, but I wonder whether doing that 7-8 years later means that they missed a golden opportunity to become a leader in the Linux and Unix software and hardware market (including on X86).
Open that code up and consider that a significant part of a complete, sincere apology.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Their logo does look similar to a swastika. Isn't that proof enough? :-)
For a while, I would agree with the above, but I'm seeing a lot of signs of life out of Sun lately. They really get open source software, and are making money off of it. Simon Phipps this week at Jazoon '08 noted they're making more money off OpenSolaris these past couple years than the past 8 years combined.
It's very easy to pick at a company's decisions -- but it's really hard to turn around a huge company with an entrenched culture; other UNIX players weren't pure plays and are so diversified that it's both easy to hide their own problems (how's HP-UX doing?) or to entice hardware purchases because of broader relationships & bundling (IBM is classic at this).
Sun still has a lot of runway ahead of it. $3B in cash. $13.8b in revenues a year, which is UP $2.8b from 2005. The recent quarter problems are concerning but in context were a 0.5% drop in revenue year-over-year. Yes, it's very bad that they're not very profitable, but let's put it in context -- their big losses were 5 years ago or more. Apple was in much, much worse shape in the mid 90's. Motorola just lost $2.1 billion in revenue from their mobile phone division.
Sun is drifting slowly towards death, but, as they say, the green mile is sometimes quite long.
-Stu
Announcing the end of Solaris x86 was a cunning marketing ploy to test the waters as to the demand for Solaris on commodity hardware. Not long after they resurrected it a port to x86-64 was done...
Stick Men
Now if I want to buy your appliance I have to ponder that I would be locking myself in.
With somebody selling me a similar appliance with a GPLed core, I would not have such concern.
For consumers GPLed stuff is the way to go, any companies that do not heed this may struggle in the future.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
SO credit where credit is due.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.