Sun Banks On Open Source For Its Survival

CWmike writes "In moving to cut its current workforce by between 15% and 18% today, Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife. And today's announcement made it clear that Sun officials are banking on the company's open-source strategy to help it pull through. A cut of up to 6,000 employees at Sun will hurt, but CEO Jonathan Schwartz contends users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun's GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress." Reader Barence also pointed out that Sun will begin to auction "branding space" in OpenOffice.

Comments

No f**ing way.

[Jane Q. Public]

If they want to stay afloat, they want the support of businesses. And from the position of a business owner, there is no way -- I mean NO WAY -- that I will accept advertising on my business documents. If somebody tried this STUPID move I would not only stop using their free product, I would refuse to use their commercial version. The idea is ASININE.

Schwartz needs to stop believing in the Mel Brooks idea of "the Schwartz be with you". This is not a Mel Brooks movie.

Sun needs market share. And they will never get it if this is the way they want to roll.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Firehed]

On or alongside? Obviously nobody would go for any free service that inserts ads INTO their business documents, but I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing. It's never once bothered me in Gmail, and I honestly don't even know if they're present in GDocs. Neither is Sun's product of course, but Google seems to be doing quite well by, at it's core, providing free products to people.

Something tells me that I'd find it significantly more distracting in OpenOffice, but that's probably more due to its interface being more than cluttered enough already. I'm sure part of it is that we're used to seeing ads in a browser window but nowhere else; I think the bigger issue is that giant stupid flashing banners that some people try using to monetize their freeware is hugely distracting to the point where it makes the product harder to use. OO is a respectable piece of competition for MSOffice for 99% of users, but after having been spoiled by the interface in Apple's $80 iWork08 suite, OO is never something I'd pay for given its paid competition. If they could revamp it with a clean interface and wanted to put a narrow strip of text ads at the top for unpaid users, I suppose that's an option.

It's a bad position to be in - right now, OpenOffice is just burning money, it's not easily monetized through advertising (probably ineffective, lower acceptance, too small of an audience), and it probably wouldn't stand a chance of competing as paid software. Even if it was $10 at Best Buy and still free for download (identical versions, you're paying for the CD and distribution basically), people are so tuned into "Microsoft(R) Office[TM]" as their office suite that it would just get ignored in stores.

MySQL at least seems to have a business model behind it, and one that's at least not losing money even if it's not immensely profitable (I have no idea what the numbers look like, but it can't be bringing in a ton or else they wouldn't be having these issues).

Re:No f**ing way.

[NoobixCube]

Certainly not a smart move with Novell doing their repackage with Go-oo, and IBM basing Lotus off an earlier version. I can just see the users flocking in droves to either of those two suites now. This is Novell's chance to basically steal OpenOffice.org right out of Sun's hands. I'm not sure if Novell would handle it well, but they can hardly do worse than Sun, from what I've heard about their management of OO.o.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I don't _think_ they mean that; it wouldn't really work anyway as someone would fork the project. I _think_ they meant assisting companies that was to brand the office product, so if say Dell wanted to pre-load an office suite, they could install a Dell branded Star-Office or OOo.

I could be wrong of course! But what you are suggesting is sooooo off-the-scale-dumb that really can't see that being what they meant!

Re:No f**ing way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ac cause I'm modding

There are many different kinds of branding. Schwartz didn't specify (in his blog) what he meant by 'branding', so don't jump the gun.
I seriously doubt that an office doc is going to have 'Sponsored by Dell' either as a watermark or a footnote on a printed page.
What I do see if that every time OO3.x starts up, you'll see 'OO3.x Sponsored by Dell' and their logo. Maybe even a splash screen before a saved document opens. You may even see a Dell logo on a toolbar, like FF or IE.
That's acceptable use of branding.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

there is no way -- I mean NO WAY -- that I will accept advertising on my business documents.

That is not even close to what Schwartz is planning. In his blog he compares how Sun gets paid for the optional bundling of the Google Search Bar with the Java installer. He then goes on to say that he plans on selling that kind of 'space' to other companies. He makes the point that Sun distributed 60 million java runtimes last MONTH - that is a lot of eyeballs to advertise to and that's what he as apparently monetized even further with microsoft in addition to or instead of google.

As for similar bundling with OpenOffice, he's talking about including links (not just URLs) to services, similar to the Google searchbar - e.g. fax services, place kinkos for bulk printing, sign printing, cloud-based document storage, and database hosting, etc. It is the same thing we are used to with free software, the software is one a time cost so make it free once its paid for, but the individual, optional but useful services around the software have ongoing costs so use them as a source of income.

You won't have to use any of the "cobranded" services, but if you want to, Sun will make it really, really easy for you to do so, and in return they get a cut of whatever you spend in the services.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Jurily]

I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing.

Except when you have a mobile dial-up, and you get 3 Gb a month. Then, anything that tries to download anything I didn't tell it to gets deleted, fast. Like MSN Messenger.

Re:No f**ing way.

[nurb432]

I totally agree.

Koffice wont have that advertisement noise.

Re:No f**ing way.

[ozphx]

Is that the Google Search Bar which installed by default when I installed a minor update to the JRE? Cocksuckers didn't even ask me, if I used the "Recommended Settings" - it just suddenly appeared.

Fucking terrible behaviour.

Re:No f**ing way.

[DiegoBravo]

>I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing.

Maybe at some places, but the odds are against it. For example, think of the PDF converters that left a watermark and ask you to pay in order to clear it. No serious business will ever deliver a "free software watermarked document" to a client or partner (that's the reason people indeed pays for clearing it.)

Some sectors can accept more advertising, for example, inside a university you may actually look cool/smart if you provide a document with a tag pointing to its "free processing", but of course, that community is not going to make Sun to profit.

Re:No f**ing way.

[westlake]

Google seems to be doing quite well by, at it's core, providing free products to people.

.

Strip away the add revenues from Google search and how much is left? When consumer sales hit bottom what happens to Google?

Re:No f**ing way.

[pallmall1]

...but they can hardly do worse than Sun, from what I've heard about their management of OO.o.

Sun's management of both OpenOffice and Java is lousy. They don't listen to their users -- the Java bug-tracking and voting system is bogus, and OpenOffice is "primitive".

Read the threads linked to above to get an idea of Sun's utter cluelessness.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Greyfox]

It's pretty much the same inside the company. Sun used to be a company of engineers who made cool things. I don't get the feeling there was a market focus to that work, they just made cool things and the market just happened to want those cool things.

Somewhere along the line the engineers making cool things were replaced by "Process Black-Belts" who spend all their time talking about "six sigma" and making engineers fill out reams of paperwork to make the smallest change to an existing product, never-mind innovating on something new and cool that the market might want.

Well now Google is the one in the industry making cool things and Sun is competing against IBM with its products. IBM doesn't waste time with Six-Sigma process people. They focus on the customer and build what the customer wants. When you're competing against IBM the problem is that your customers realize that IBM is most likely still going to be here in 20 years and your company most likely is not.

Sun could reverse this process by starting to make cool things again and trusting that if they build it the market will come. I don't really see that happening, though. They'll probably fire all their engineers and keep all their process people, which is exactly the reverse of what they should be doing.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, but since OO is open source, why would anybody download the version with adds? I mean they're going to have to make some huge improvements on the "ad-supported" version to make it better than the open source version, and there's nothing to stop the open source version from catching up in a couple months anyway.

I don't get it.

Re:No f**ing way.

[jmorris42]

> I _think_ they meant assisting companies that was to brand the office product, so if say
> Dell wanted to pre-load an office suite, they could install a Dell branded Star-Office or OOo.

They would certainly do that, but as I just noted in a post above, there will be no OEM preloading of OO.o because Microsoft would destroy anyone who attacked it in such a direct way. Simply forcing them to buy Windows at the retail OEM rates would be more than enough to do it and 100% legal. So that's off the table.

I'm just hoping Sun will be sane enough to understand where the line will be that simply kills OO.o at Sun and moves the project to Novell/Microsoft. There are a lot of ways to do co-branding that would only be annoying to users and not instantly lethal to Sun.

Annoying:

Inserting a virtual printer target that submits your document to an online printer/finisher for printout, binding and either ships the finished work or lets you pick it up at the neighborhood shop.

Add UI widgets to use an officially blessed net to fax gateway.

Add click to buy buttons for additional clipart, fonts, themes, templates, etc. from third parties. Perhaps with free previews, sample, etc.

Probably lethal:

Sticking an ad banner in the running product.

Instantly lethal:

Inserting ANY advertising into the output of printed documents or presentations.

Re:No f**ing way.

[mikael]

Sun used to have 'ambassadors', sales and marketing people who would be contacted when the large companies like Pixar, Ford and Boeing wanted to make a block purchase of servers and workstations for their new projects. The purchasing companies would compare the performance of the different vendors systems and choose a system based on the performance/price ratio combined with a preferred vendor bias.

But when there is so much more competition from commodity systems purchased from online PC system builders, maybe this doesn't happen now. Desktop systems with Four core Intel/AMD with two/three/four SLI/Crossfire accelerator boards with GigaBytes of memory, 8 GBytes memory and 1000 MBit Ethernet are available at consumer prices.

Re:No f**ing way.

[wikinerd]

I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing

I think there are lots of people who are bothered enough to install Iceweasel (Firefox) plugins to prevent such advertisements.

Re:No f**ing way.

[slashtivus]

The Opera browser tried this strategy, was out long before Firefox and was (arguably) better (certainly better than IE). People stayed away in droves, and these were just private individuals, not businesses which I would think would object even more.

Re:No f**ing way.

[rtb61]

Let us just consider the idea of people not being bothered by advertisements while they are working. Let us ponder employers who would be happy with the employees watching adds about employments agencies and new places of employment while they are working. How about holidays and overseas trips while they are meant to be concentrating. Could you imagine a customer having an embedded add from your competitor buried in the document you sent them.

Seriously, any foolish company that would accept adds in the workplace or be happy to give away all it's business intelligence for hosted applications when FOSS software like OpenOffice.org is available and will always be available, permanently free of any licence fees or subversive messages, is fated to disappear.

Re:No f**ing way.

[mikechant]

They would certainly do that, but as I just noted in a post above, there will be no OEM preloading of OO.o because Microsoft would destroy anyone who attacked it in such a direct way. Simply forcing them to buy Windows at the retail OEM rates would be more than enough to do it and 100% legal. So that's off the table.

Firstly, I'm not convinced that MS could/would take on and 'destroy' a company like Dell.

Secondly, this tactic is almost certainly anti-competitive and *not* '100% legal' in the EU. It would probably get them tied up in another lengthy case with the European commission, which they give the impression of being keen to avoid.

However, it's probably more likely that a company like Dell would use the threat of OO to get MS to give them a really cheap deal on selling (say) Office Home & Student with new PCs.

Of course, Dell *does* already sell some PCs with OO preloaded - just not the ones with Windows...

Re:No f**ing way.

[Moredhel]

Sun does appear to be reversing the process - this is how the new FishWorks product was developed. They got some smart people, put them in a room together and left them to it, like a startup inside the company.

Now lets see if they can replicate that.

Re:No f**ing way.

[k8to]

Hey man, us cocksuckers are offended to be associated with such behavior!

;-)

Re:No f**ing way.

[Blackknight]

ZFS, dtrace, zones, Solaris Cluster, xen, java, and MySQL aren't "cool things?"

Sun is one of the biggest open source companies around even if their OS isn't the most popular. I know if it wasn't for SXCE and OpenSolaris I wouldn't be using Sun products at all, it's great to have the free versions to learn on and you can just add a support contract later if you want it.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Fred_A]

The Opera browser tried this strategy, was out long before Firefox and was (arguably) better (certainly better than IE). People stayed away in droves, and these were just private individuals, not businesses which I would think would object even more.

Of course, whether this was because of the included ads is debatable. The fact remains that most random users have never heard of Opera. Nowadays their core business is probably the embedded browsers with the desktop one just an aside.
And I regularly meet (Windows, what a coincidence) users that *still* have never heard of Firefox, even here in Europe (30% of marketshare). Apparently they only use a couple websites, or only use email.

Re:No f**ing way.

[Fred_A]

Somewhere along the line the engineers making cool things were replaced by "Process Black-Belts" who spend all their time talking about "six sigma" and making engineers fill out reams of paperwork to make the smallest change to an existing product, never-mind innovating on something new and cool that the market might want.

In my experience, increasing nonsense paperwork and "six sigma" kind of stuff is the surest sign that a company is circling the drain.

If your depiction is true, it looks like the sunset to me. :(

daft

[superskippy]

Much as I like open source, giving stuff away is really not what a business that need some cash needs right now.

Re:daft

[aliquis]

I don't think they see it as much as giving stuff away as potentially getting developers for free.

They need further development, they can't afford it right now, open source code offers a solution.

They earn their money on supported versions, hardware and also support of running the systems I assume.

Re:daft

[gatkinso]

No one said it has to be $free$.

Re:daft

[wikinerd]

They should be giving away more and more free software: you don't want to be forgotten during economic hardship. You want to remain popular and your trademark being correlated in people's minds with "very useful free stuff". You also want everyone to visit your servers to download your free stuff. After you have built and sustained your popularity and fame, you can find lots of ways to cash in. But putting ads into the free stuff is not a good way as it would make the free stuff less useful.

Strategy

[should_be_linear]

Java good, Netbeans good, MySQL good, OpenOffice OK, Glassfish good, OpenSolaris.... WTF? Why burning cash on redudant OS when few advantages over Linux could easily moved to Linux kernel? Do they understand amount of money needed to implent at least decent amount of hardware support?

Re:Strategy

[m50d]

Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux, along with having some unique features of its own. But more than anything it provides a platform that is all Sun's, complete with backwards compatibility going back over ten years even in the drivers (compare with linux where I struggle to compile modules from six months ago against new releases). You're right that hardware support is currently lacking, but there's still time for that to come - and architecturally Opensolaris has the potential to be a much better OS than Linux. It is not at all redundant.

Re:Strategy

[jhol13]

CDDL over GPL is one advantage, to some. Another is binary drivers.

Lets face it, neither is ever going to be in Linux.

Re:Strategy

[superskippy]

I disagree. Whether you think Java is any good or not, Sun have made a profit of 0c over all time on it, and will never make any money on it. I think MySQL is cack, but even if you don't, if you've got money to spend on databases, you aren't going to give it to MySQL.

Solaris on SPARC hardware is the gold standard of reliability and quality. So if need the best reliability and you've got money to burn (i.e. banks), that's what Sun should be able to persuade you to buy. If you own the best OS in the world, and you can't make money, you've got big problems.

Re:Strategy

[QuantumG]

All of these things have advantages over other things.

Your mistake is in thinking that Sun won't sell you a solution that isn't based on their technology. They will. They'll sell you whatever will do the job and they can get a decent price on the license so they can make some profit.

Re:Strategy

[Adam Hazzlebank]

I'm keep thinking about Opensolaris and that I should try it out. Perhaps someone here would be kind enough the highlight it's key advantages?

Re:Strategy

[Ed Avis]

Two words: ZFS.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

> Solaris on SPARC hardware is the gold standard of reliability and quality.

(Lack of) Momentum behind Solaris, SUN's own sales figures and many more things disagree with you.

Re:Strategy

[superskippy]

That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.

Re:Strategy

[aliquis]

lol, yeah, leenucks is so much like the better one! Everything must be leenucks! Linus = god, Sun = shit. Why would one want to have a choice when it comes to OSes!?! Linux is like so much the best in everything!! We don't need no other OS or development.

Have you used OpenSolaris? Have you had issues with hardware support yourself? Have you used the BSDs or Linux 10 years ago?

Why burn cash and developers time on Gnome!?! Why on Firefox? Anything except Amarok? Another terminal than aterm!?!

We need plenty more of you! Windows, IE, WMP and MSN 'ought to be enough for everyone!

Ford T is the best!

Re:Strategy

[amorsen]

Or maybe Solaris on SPARC isn't as fantastic as you think. Back in the day when SPARC hardware actually mattered, the Linux SPARC port was rather successful. People actually chose to run Linux even though Solaris came free with the hardware and had perfect driver compatibility.

I don't see a future for Sun, no matter which part of their business they focus on, except possibly MySQL. Sun can't live off of MySQL unless they turn themselves into MySQL AB, and then what was the point?

Re:Strategy

[aliquis]

complete with backwards compatibility going back over ten years even in the drivers (compare with linux where I struggle to compile modules from six months ago against new releases)

Reminds me when an upgrade to ArchLinux just removed whatever USB-device handling stuff there was earlier and replaced it with something else which made it so no USB-devices worked. Awesome stuff! I will never try ArchLinux again. Or Yoper, or plenty of shitty Linux dists.

At least with things like Debian and the BSDs things keep on working, I have no interest in spending my time with a by the distribution developers voluntarily messed up machine. And I do assume that there would be much less mess in Solaris once things is up and running.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to say something, then make the effort to say something meaningful.

"Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux" What is this supposed to mean?

Installations vary. It depends on what applications are installed and running. There are many Linux based servers around the world with up times running in years. Your blanket statement is nonsense.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me, but do you happen to be retarded? Considering the amount of stupidity in your post, I'm amazed you managed to figure out this "keyboard" thingy well enough to sprout such garbage.

Re:Strategy

[jimicus]

That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.

History is littered with the corpses of companies that had great products but were lousy at selling them.

Re:Strategy

[pbhj]

That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.

Sometimes the best just costs too much. If the extra expense doesn't produce any extra return then no matter how hard you tout it, provided your customers have the sense, you won't sell it.

I love sirloin steak, but beef mince fills me up too.

Re:Strategy

[jcnnghm]

But they do make money from Java. In FY2008, Sun made $220M from Java, $208M from MySQL, and $216M from Solaris and Virtualization.

In addition to that, they made a little over $4B from hardware and software support.

There software business is up 27% from FY2008 Q1 to FY2009 Q1. Compare that to their systems business that is down 17% over the same time frame.

Re:Strategy

[mickwd]

The post above has already highlighted some advantages, so this is just to point out how easy it is to try out.

Just download the OpenSolaris ISO (the last one was 2008.05, with 2008.11 imminent): OpenSolaris

If you're a little masochistic, try running it as a live CD.

A better way is to download VirtualBox (another Sun open-source product, although there is a more-complete non-open-source version that is also free (of charge)): VirtualBox
Just install OpenSolaris as a guest OS and try it - no need to re-partition or dual-boot, and no problems with unsupported PC hardware either.

Of course, you'll be limited in your ability to try out some of its more advanced features with this approach, but for just trying it out and kicking the tyres a bit, it's very simple.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

People actually chose to run Linux even though Solaris came free with the hardware and had perfect driver compatibility.

I attribute that to bias, laziness, and fear of the unknown. Was the system still under support when they did that? People who do that are less familiar with Solaris since they couldn't run it at home for free. They've been running Linux so long that they can't seem to bother to learn a new OS, or the idiosyncracies of a slighty different OS. They'd rather install something familiar. I doubt that it was necessarily the better OS for the system.

I see this with students in the university all the time. The majority of undergrads come to the system with Windows at home and won't bother learning anything but very basic unix to do their CS work. They learn just enough to get by and pass the classes. Very few even want to use the Macs, much less the unix systems, unless they have to. Lower division Undergrad classes are required to use Unix for their coursework, which is the only reason they use it. By the time they reach upper division, most are back on windows, using their own laptops or crowding the Windows labs. They've never sat down and run man on /bin and /sbin commands. They're always having basic problems with finding out how to get things done.

A similar thing happens with the grad students, except that they're using linux or Mac and don't like other flavors of Unix unless they're required to use it. Everyone wants what's familiar. They develope a bias towards the familiar and against the unfamiliar.

I've worked on several varieties of Unix and Linux as well as Windows and Macs so I've had no problems adapting. However the majority of users choose what is familiar to them due to laziness and/or fear. I've hacked my way through Novell's Netware. I've worked through VMS. I've programmed for Mac/Unix/Windows and the hardest part was always the initial transition of learning the new systems. I've supported Various Unix system, and the hardest part was learning the idiosyncracies of each. They're always annoying initially while you figure out how it's done differently.

There's always some fear of the unknown, but that should be overcome if you want to do your job well. You use the system that suits the job. You don't cram linux into everything just because you can't handle learning the OS. However, with that said, sometimes linux is the best OS for the job at hand. If that's the case don't buy solaris sparc hardware. That's just wasting money. It's stupid.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, keep saying this crap but then don't wonder why you're going out of business

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!

Sun hardware is a joke and the Sparc processor is stuck at 1 Ghz - who cares that it has 8 cores its slow. The average 2K$ Linux/Windoze server slaps it silly.

The only question is who will take over Java and OpenOffice when Sun does Chapter 11.

Re:Strategy

[LateArthurDent]

Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux

Bullshit. The last two times I tried opensolaris, the installation was catastrophically destroyed the first time that I upgraded it. System wouldn't even fucking boot.

It might be stable if you never touch it, but so is linux, so the difference can't be that great. Besides, an admin is expected to, at the very least, perform security upgrades on a regular basis. Their packaging system is *beyond* broken and smf is a horrible piece of trash that makes you long for the simplicity of rc.d scripts.

Re:Strategy

[turgid]

Sun can't live off of MySQL unless they turn themselves into MySQL AB, and then what was the point?

Quite. And before they bought MySQL (the VHS of databases) they were already shipping the superior PostgreSQL with Solaris 10.

They obviously bought MySQL as a kind of marketing stunt. It hasn't really paid off.

Every year, Sun buys a big company, and a few months later lays off thousands of staff. Remember Cobalt? StorageTek? Now MySQL. They get a big tax discount for redundancies.

There are some brilliant minds and brilliant technologies in Sun. The crown jewels are Solaris, Java and UltraSPARC. Sun has been at the forefront of Open Source since its inception (contrary to what you might hear here). What they do badly is PHBs and NIH egomaniac engineers in certain geographical locations.

Niagara is cool, but where the heck is Rock guys? What's taking you so long?

I hope it isn't going to be another "project Millenium" a.k.a. UltraSPARC V.

Re:Strategy

[Blakey Rat]

Maybe you overestimate how much the platform matters. In the server market, virtually everything runs on virtually everything. (With exceptions for legacy OSes like OS/400). What does it matter if I have the "best" hardware platform when I can run the exact same software on "not-as-good" platforms, and buy twice as many boxes?

Re:Strategy

[Sxooter]

I still remember installing the last versions of redhat compiled for sparc on an old 32 bit Sparcstation 20 with 4 50MHz CPUs and watching it quite literally trounce a 64 bit 200MHz dual CPU Ultra 20 or something like that running 64 bit solaris.

And it trounced it at everything. PostgreSQL db, apache serving, file serving, everything. It was anywhere from 50% to several hundred % faster. This was back in the RedHat 6.x days with a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel (can't remember which one that had, I think it was 2.2).

Re:Strategy

[turgid]

In the olden days, operating system stability was a measure of how long a heavily-loaded system could stay up without crashing, or exhibiting weird behaviour.

Nowadays, in these parts (slashdot), it means anything from "how easy it is to install" to "can I install a new driver without reading the manual."

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Whether you think Java is any good or not, Sun have made a profit of 0c over all time on it, and will never make any money on it.

Really? Their CEO seems to think they make alot of money off of it :)

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/200810 (See subheading titled "Wait, you make money off Java?").

Re:Strategy

[mysidia]

Bullshit. The last two times I tried opensolaris, the installation was catastrophically destroyed the first time that I upgraded it. System wouldn't even fucking boot.

Linux systems frequently do similar things. Sometimes upgrades get botched.

No OS will be stable if the admin upgrading it isn't testing their update first and competent in the proper upgrade procedures and familiar with how to do a recovery or manual update/rollback if something is wrong with an upgrade package.

If you've just tried Solaris a few times, then you are not what I would call a competent Solaris administrator.

Would you let someone who's just tried out Linux a few times upgrade your production server?

Package management is something some Linux distributions, esp. Debian excel at... which is why I like Nexenta... combines OpenSolaris with .DEB packages, and even apt-get is included.

Re:Strategy

[mysidia]

(Lack of) Momentum behind Solaris, SUN's own sales figures and many more things disagree with you.

No it is... It's just that reliability and quality aren't that scarce anymore.

Businesses would rather have lots of inexpensive stuff. If something breaks it is easy to replace without spending a fortune, and redundant elements (clustering) eliminates some of the need to necessarily have a 99% reliable server product.

There are competitors that are orders of magnitude less expensive, and a little less reliable/lower quality, but still of superb quality and reliability.

Why buy a Solaris box from Sun that will work for 10 years with 99% uptime, when you can buy two boxes instead from a competitor at a fifth of the price that will each give 93% uptime and work for 3 years without hardware failure?

Have clustering of a few less-reliable servers provides the same level of reliability as one rock-solid box.

And perhaps moreso... even with one super-reliable server, there is still a certain probability of a hardware failure or software glitch.

Plus the loss will not be as painful when the servers need to be replaced in 5 years, because now they're all too slow.

Re:Strategy

[amorsen]

They've been running Linux so long that they can't seem to bother to learn a new OS, or the idiosyncracies of a slighty different OS. They'd rather install something familiar. I doubt that it was necessarily the better OS for the system.

Linux hadn't existed long enough to be entrenched like that. However, performance was better than Solaris (it was difficult for anything to be slower, of course), and you got tools that didn't segfault at the slightest provocation without having to spend two days replacing the Solaris user space with GNU.

Re:Strategy

[jvillain]

If you allready know Linux which is growing, why would you want to invest a lot of time learning an OS that very likely won't be around in a year. The stock value of Sun is now lower than the cash on hand. That makes them prime for a break up or buy out. There is a very real chance that SCO will be around longer than Sun will. So if I am buying new hardware why would I want to buy from Sun with the chance that thy will be gone before the support period is over? And why would I want to waste time learning an OS with no future?

Re:Strategy

[amorsen]

The crown jewels are Solaris, Java and UltraSPARC.

UltraSPARC is dead. Fujitsu was always better at making SPARC chips with high single-thread performance, and Sun has given up on that line completely. Java is successful but it doesn't look like that means any money for Sun. Solaris, well, that deal worked as long as people bought Sun hardware to run it.

Re:Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you think Java is any good or not, Sun have made a profit of 0c over all time on it

Dude... There are entire countries where every single citizen are carrying their mandatory ID in their wallet and its... A Java Smartcard. In Brazil the whole medical system works with Java Smartcards.

And Sun is making a lot of money with Java in the mobile market. They're one of the main KVM seller. (Of course now that there are some free KVMs and that Google came with their own VM in that market, Sun has a problem).

But saying that they didn't make any money with Java is just plain dumb.

Java is the biggest language success story of the last 20 years (no, C#/.Net isn't carried in citizen's wallets) and Sun did manage to capitalize a little bit on it, whether you like it or not.

Re:Strategy

[turgid]

Indeed, and I'm glad they downsized me in 2005. It was a blessing in disguise.

They just can't seem to execute on UltraSPARC development, and had to start selling Fujitsu boxes. Niagara is cool, but it's a niche. Their Opteron boxes are pretty cool in terms of price/performance and they lost the allergy to Linux, albeit a bit late.

Solaris sells a lot of hardware for IBM and HP, though. It beats AIX hands-down.

Re:Strategy

[k8to]

Um. I've been using Linux at work and at home since 1996. The last time a Linux upgrade got botched in a way that I couldn't fix in 5 minutes was when I tried to upgrade slackware in 1996 after doing ill-advised attempts at hand-upgrading gnu libc, the compiler, and the kernel on the advice of a friend.

Hell, the last time I saw a problem at all on upgrade was on a SuSE upgrade in 1998 when the ftp mirror didn't have the packages it wanted.

Re:Strategy

[k8to]

If you have so much money to throw at he problem, and you really need crazy reliability that doesn't require hand-feeding, you could be using something with much more serious reliability like an s390. And.. unsurprisingly that's what many large institutions do.

I don't love them, but if that's what you really prize in systems, they have more than sun kit.

Re:Strategy

[LateArthurDent]

Linux systems frequently do similar things.

No, they really don't. I've never had an upgrade cause a system to not boot in either linux or windows. Even back in the days when I was learning those systems.

Sometimes upgrades get botched.

Yes, that's why I said, "catastrophically destroyed." It wasn't just a case of it screwing up a few things. The computer wouldn't boot. Opensolaris isn't including a safemode option, and it wouldn't even boot into single-user mode after editing the grub menu. My options for manual recovery are limited if I can't get to a shell.

Eventually I used the livecd to mount the hard drive and chroot into it in an attempt for recovery, but that turned out to also be a pain, because smf requires you to have a service running to edit service scripts. What kind of brain dead design is that? Eventually I decided I didn't want to deal with it anymore, I was just trying it out for fun and it wasn't worth the trouble, I'm plenty happy with linux.

No OS will be stable if the admin upgrading it isn't testing their update first and competent in the proper upgrade procedures and familiar with how to do a recovery or manual update/rollback if something is wrong with an upgrade package.

By varying definitions of stable. In a production environment where the server must always be up, you need to do all that to guard against an important service going down, or an application not working. However, I have no qualms about telling people to keep the automatically update setting enabled for windows or ubuntu, because I'm pretty confident nothing will break so badly that they won't be able to use their computer anymore.

If you've just tried Solaris a few times, then you are not what I would call a competent Solaris administrator.

I agree, I'm not a solaris admin at all. But I didn't have that experience back in a time when I wasn't a competent linux admin. Pretty much all distributions I tried for fun were always usable even if some things didn't work, or didn't work as well as others.

Would you let someone who's just tried out Linux a few times upgrade your production server?

No, but as I said, I'd have no qualms about letting them update their own computer. In fact, I recommend that people keep automatic updates on.

Package management is something some Linux distributions, esp. Debian excel at... which is why I like Nexenta... combines OpenSolaris with .DEB packages, and even apt-get is included.

Fair enough, I should give Nexenta a try. That still doesn't mean smf doesn't suck. The thing also tended to have problems booting if it wasn't shut down correctly. Yes, production servers have UPS's, but like I said, a truly stable system should be able to be resistant to unexpected problems.

Re:Strategy

[raptor21]

Yes, that's why I said, "catastrophically destroyed." It wasn't just a case of it screwing up a few things. The computer wouldn't boot. Opensolaris isn't including a safemode option, and it wouldn't even boot into single-user mode after editing the grub menu. My options for manual recovery are limited if I can't get to a shell.

Ahem! OpenSolaris' pkg image-update snapshots the entire root filesystem before the update. You can just do a simple restore of the ZFS files system Or boot the liveCD import the ZFS pool and do the restore from there.

Re:Strategy

[LateArthurDent]

Ahem! OpenSolaris' pkg image-update snapshots the entire root filesystem before the update. You can just do a simple restore of the ZFS files system Or boot the liveCD import the ZFS pool and do the restore from there.

Rolling back isn't the issue. I was trying out the operating system (and using virtualbox, I had a snapshot of the system as it was immediately after installation). If I do what you suggest, I end up with a working system as it was immediately before the update. Meaning, nothing is updated, meaning when I update again, it's going to break again.

As I explained in that post, I did manage to boot the livecd and import the zfs pool. I didn't want to do a rollback, I wanted to fix the problem the update introduced. When that proved difficult, I gave up because I wasn't that interested in it.

I will say that ZFS is the one badass feature in solaris that I got to check out, though. I can do the ZFS thing in freebsd, though. I didn't get a chance to try out the other stuff I was interested in, such as dtrace.

Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Suns long term (5-10 year) prospects just don't look good. Their core of products are all up against strong competition. The Sparc architecture is not significantly better than x86-64 to justify the additional cost and "non-standard" architecture to buyers, Solaris has some nice features but is up against both Linux & itself on x86-64 & IA32, where Linux continues to eat into the market share of traditional UNIX systems, and their x86-64 servers are commodity boxes which you can (& do) buy from someone else. Oh and of course Java and OpenOffice are established products that they have no way to capitalise on, essentially making them money-sinks on the balance sheet.

Sun has to find a way to create a sustainable revenue stream, and it doesn't have much to work with.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[QuantumG]

They're a systems integration company. They don't need to sell "invented here" to be profitable.

Sun will sell you whatever you want. Invented by Sun, or not.

They sell solutions, not widgets.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks great on paper, but doesn't provide a significant revenue stream in practice. The last time I saw anyone buy a "solution" from Sun was, well, never.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[superskippy]

No, that's IBM.

I remember Sun adverts during the dot-com boom days that mocked IBM for having a huge range of stuff, where as Sun sold only one simple stack of stuff- theirs.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[nurb432]

Lets hope they don't take good things like open office and java down with them. ( like it sounds they are doing.. )

Advertisements? How stupid can you get.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[jcnnghm]

Their FY2008 services revenue was $5.26B, storage revenue was $2.35B, and their computer systems revenue was $6.26B.

While the services revenue is up 3% from FY 2007, storage revenue is only up 1.6%, and computer systems revenue is down about 3%.

Given that 38% of their revenue is derived from services, and that services is their fastest growing growth sector, what makes you believe that services doesn't provide a revenue stream in practice?

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[TheGratefulNet]

The Sparc architecture is not significantly better than x86-64 to justify the additional cost and "non-standard" architecture to buyers,

they pretty much stopped doing sparc stuff years ago. their new gig is the T series (t1000 and t2000 series). these are high-cpu (thread) count chips and when you do the equiv of 'show cpu' (so to speak) you get 32, 64 even 256 lines of output on status per 'cpu' (thread) that you can turn on or off (on a running system) or put into pending-standby. you CANNOT do anything even close to this on x86 arch.

these are dog slow in fpu but on webservers and commerce boxes (what they are meant for) - they shine. you can have 'lotsa cpus' in a thin 1U box. can't quite do that in x86 land.

(ob disc: I work at sun, but not actually on these boxes, just with the boxes)

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[drspliff]

But will that be changing any time soon? We can all see financial problems on the horizon for Sun, yet they have the tech, people, products and customers to become much more like IBM.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare Suns income from services and system integration to someone like HP or IBM and tell me that Sun are a services company.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't even be worried about stable revenue stream. What has been typical to Sun for the last 10 years is that it doesn't have any strategically significant prospect. Sure, it has lots of aok products, but they all are faced with competitors' products. Having something that the competitors can not respond to is what makes companies strive, and to make good profit, and stay afloat for great times. In short, in competitive environments it is best to strike the opponents where they have no defence.

Just take a look at what Sun offers now. It is all nice, but there is nothing really magnificent or unique - and I am counting all their products and services. To be honest, Sun is a sinking ship. It has been that for 10 years now, and will continue for at least next 10, until some day the last employee leaving will turn off the lights and lock the front door.

There is nothing that would make me invest into the company, and their partial attempts to fix that has been just that: partial. What really is wrong in Sun is that they are playing cautious when they should be taking risks for the future. It is a leading culture thing, which is nearly unfixable juding the level of the current management. Good riddance, say I.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[jcnnghm]

Apples to oranges isn't it. If 38% of your revenue is derived from services, you are most definitely in the service business.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you obviously haven't looked very closely lately. Sun has partnerships with Dell, Fujitsu, Microsoft, and others.

They will sell customers solutions; not their own stack.

They're happy to sell you anything they offer whether you get the whole stack or not.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[TheSunborn]

You do know that the T Series, were actuelly X86_64 cpu until Sun bought it, and changed the instruction set to sparc right?

Personally I think that change, was the biggest mistake that sun have done in recent years.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sparc architecture IS better than x86-64.
x86-64 is so widespread that it's less expensive and SParc is more expensive.

Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

If your revenue is only a fraction of your competitors then it is not a sustainable long term revenue stream. Sun can not out-manoeuvre their bigger and more established (services-wise) competitors. It is not a winning long term strategy for them.

They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Phantom Gremlin]

I'm not a software guy, so maybe I'm missing something. But paying $1 billion for MySQL (less than 1 year ago!) didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Wasn't a lot of the code GPL?

As of yesterday the stock market values the equity at $3 billion. And actually values the company at only $1.6 billion (they have $2.6 billion in cash but also have $1.3 billion in debt).

Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business. Even in 2008, a billion US dollars is still a *lot* of money.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[QuantumG]

MySQL's business model was to sell commercial licenses to people who were too legal risk adverse to use it without one.

Sun, thankfully, has a completely different business model.

They sell solutions. If they don't have to pay for licenses for MySQL they can offer solutions that include MySQL for cheaper than if they have to. Does that add up to a billion dollars? No idea.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[wrook]

I think the point was that Sun could easily sell solutions with MySQL without buying the company. So in essence they spent $1 billion on the name.

If they think it will bring in that amount of profit in contracts, then I guess it's worth it. But I wonder if they have the staff left to do that kind of volume. Just some back of the envelope calculations:

    10% profit over loaded labour rate
    $100K loaded labour rate (in order to undercut in-house development)
    equals 10K profit per man-year of development.

or 100K man years of development to break even. Nope... I can't see it working out.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

The question isn't "does that add up to a billion dollars". The question is: "after how many months does this add up to a billion dollars". Usually not 12 months; far more. I'd bet on 36, but thats a wild guess.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[antifoidulus]

Actually the thing they sold(and still do sell) is a more "up to date" MySQL(including security fixes). The community version of mysql is always a little bit behind the Enterprise version in terms of bug fixes etc. They also sell support and probably engineering as well(don't know, haven't used that). We bought the MySQL enterprise edition where I work because we are being forced to be paranoid about security, and that includes always having the latest and greatest db software(whether or not MySQL is more or less secure than Postgres is another matter altogether)

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

They also sell "MySQL boxes" - that their engineering group has tuned specifically to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware and give it to the database. Schwartz talks about doubling the performance of MySQL on certain equivalent hardware platforms. Presumably anybody could do that, or they could pay for the MySQL engineering team to do it and get it right. Schwartz is banking on it being more cost effective for customers to rely on the MySQL engineering team to do the optimizations than to do it themselves.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[BlackCreek]

I think the point was that Sun could easily sell solutions with MySQL without buying the company. So in essence they spent $1 billion on the name.

I believe that part of the purpose of a buyout such as that is to also get hold of the developers.

I am not saying that the whole deal was worth 1 billion, but you have to take the "getting the core developers to be on our boat" into account as well.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

I really cannot understand that purchase either, the MySQL team isn't making that good money. And their database is the worst database on the market by far.

How can people live with a database that cannot do a simple self join in an update statement. Or even worse, doesn't support check constraints(they have to be emulated through triggers).

Sun should have stayed with PostgreSQL and instead used 1/1000 of the MySQL purchase amount to improve PostgreSQL.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[jimicus]

whether or not MySQL is more or less secure than Postgres is another matter altogether

Now that statement puzzles me.

If your systems are designed for maximum security, the database is on a separate server to the application, both servers are firewalled to only allow known-good connections through, the connection between application and database may if necessary be encrypted, the user the application connects to the database as will only have the permissions it needs (and indeed won't even be able to establish a remote connection as any other user) and the application should always be using parameterized SQL queries..

All of these things can be done just as easily with MySQL as Postgres.

What else could you do?

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[radarsat1]

Actually the thing they sold(and still do sell) is a more "up to date" MySQL(including security fixes).

Wouldn't that be a breach of the GPL? If they are distributing a product based on GPL code but not distributing the source with it...

As far as I remember, the GPL can't be "time shifted" like that.

Well, I guess like everything else in business, things are interpreted in units of "time-to-sue".

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[J.Y.Kelly]

They own all the copyright to the MySql code and as such they can do what they like with it.

The fact that they distribute some of their code under the GPL puts conditions on what *you* can do with it. But they aren't bound by those conditions.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Creepy Crawler]

You could have tripwire verify state on both systems and watch if there are any intrusions.

If there is, you sever the link between app and db. That's why I like using a brouter. Hackers see no firewall nor can they access it.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[martenmickos]

Thx for the comments on MySQL as part of Sun. The MySQL business is growing faster now than before (measured in revenues) and we are the fastest growing major DBMS business in the world. So, although someone could claim I am biased, I think it is fair to say that the acquisition made sense from a pure revenue growth perspective.

Additionally, Sun is selling hardware to MySQL users and customers - servers that provide a performance boost over what people use today.

Thirdly there are synergies between MySQL and Sun's various software products - especially Glassfish, NetBeans, ZFS, Identity Manager, etc. A web shop may not need all of those, but large corporations see a benefit in getting many products from the same vendor.

Still there is no denying that Sun has major challenges today. We are hard at work fixing the problems. And that's why I keep following the discussions on /. - there is always some great suggestion from someone that we can make good use of.

Marten Mickos
(formerly CEO at MySQL AB, now head of Sun's Database Group)

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Sxooter]

A commercial license to MySQL before sun bought them was $500. You can buy a whole bunch of commercial licenses, one at a time, when you need them, for a billion dollars.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Sxooter]

Sun still sells their servers with PostgreSQL. They still hire and pay the salaries of a couple of the PostgreSQL core developers.

Sadly, those developers, who are world class db hackers, were placed under the management team they bought along with MySQL, who are not world class db hackers.

Happily, the MySQL folks seem to be chafing under the yoke of Sun and leaving one at a time at a rate which will see them all gone within a year.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Unoti]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they probably coulda got a handfull of pretty good developers for mere hundreds of millions.

Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL

[Prof.Phreak]

Even in 2008, a billion US dollars is still a *lot* of money.

Someone should let congress know that!

branding?

[pkbarbiedoll]

Does Star Office having plans on "branding"? I wouldn't mind paying to turn this off, but if Sun forces me to look at McDonalds & Starbucks logos all day - forget it.

Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[Morgaine]

From my perspective (I've used and bought Suns for decades), Sun is heading full tilt down a path towards the cliff edge. What they're doing is 100% wrong.

Their interest in open source is fine, but it's not a good strategy for business profits unless they want to become another RedHat providing Linux services and support --- a role in which they would be coming up from behind very slowly. It's a role for which they're not cut out, because their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.

Sun needs to stop thinking of open source as a business strategy, because for them it's merely what's referred to as a hygiene factor in social sciences --- it's not a benefit when it's exercised, but it's a severe demerit when it's not exercised. In other words, yes, be fully open with software, but not because it's a source of profits, but because you'll be shunned without it.

For profits, capitalize on what you have: awesome hardware and competent Professional Services. Invest more in your CPU division with its great Niagara processors, so that when Intel is offering 16-core CPUs and talking about 64, you can be offering 256-core and talking about 4096. Take on nVidia and AMD on the SIMD front, so that while they're toying with noddy graphics cards for GPGPU, you can offer 64k SIMD stream processors far more tightly coupled to your host cores.

We've recently entered the Age of Multicore, and you (Sun) have a good reputation in that area, and you know how to build good hardware (nobody has ever marked you down for that). Why not capitalize on your existing skills, resources and reputation in this area, instead of chasing rainbows?

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[MtViewGuy]

The problem with Sun is that they're WAY behind the curve compared to even IBM in supporting Open Source (remember, IBM spent a huge amount of money porting Linux to run on their "big iron" platforms back in better economic times).

Because IBM has a great reputation as a computer services company nowadays, they can easily offer powerful enterprise-wide computing platforms at reasonable prices--and IBM has much more name recognition than Sun.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[Zontar The Mindless]

There's one little problem with your suggestion, Morgaine: A huge cashflow and credit crunch is in progress, and companies are NOT choosing to buy big, expensive new servers right now. According to the AP,

...[S]ales of its high-end servers... fell 27 percent in the latest quarter to $576 million. That's a staggering shortfall for a division that contributes a quarter of Sun's overall revenue.

"Build it and they will come" is not going to work in the current economic climate.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[jamesswift]

their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.

I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with that but just to provide an alternative opinion

"I think Sun has, well, with this contribution, have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership. It's an example that I hope others will follow." - Richard Stallman

http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/sun_s_choice_of_the_gpl_and_rms_in_the_webcast

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[TheRaven64]

I'm amazed that Sun are doing nothing in the mobile arena. ZFS would be amazing on small form-factor devices with flash storage, especially if you used the recording / transmit features for automatic backup when you docked the device. SPARC was designed to scale from very small to very large devices and there are a load of SPARC32 chips in embedded systems. From what I've seen of the OpenSPARC designs, the T2 would only need some small changes to be an amazing chip for handheld computing. It already has many of the same advantages as ARM, and Sun could sell a SPARC / Solaris / Java solution to mobile ODMs.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[davecb]

I quite disagree: open source needs something to run on, and the price-performance of the Niagara is impressive. In the machine room, I'd rather have Sun, IBM or H-P gear than anything built on mas-market PC parts: I hate fixing critical components (;-))

Open source software, on the other hand, is improved by being in a mass market: the price is already as low as you can get, so the effort goes into improving the quality. It's very welcome in my machine room.

--dave

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite funny quote, given the situation Sun is facing. I highly doubt other companies want to follow that example.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[jamesswift]

Maybe they will though. Freeing your code can be the software equivalent of an economic stimulus package.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[ColdWetDog]

It's Saturday. "We agree with Stahlman" day is Tuesday. Please make a note of it. Thanks.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with that but just to provide an alternative opinion ... <Sun GPL's Java link>

Your example actually illustrates the point made in the parent post though: Sun *finally* licensed Java in a FOSS-acceptable way and got kudos from RMS for it ... but only after umpteen years of prevaricating and offering excuses. Open-sourcing doesn't come easy to them.

All those years during which the open-source community saw them as "not very FOSS-friendly" on Java cost them a lot of reputation, and their single point in time PR release + FSF congratulations when they finally GPL'd it cannot really change that public perception.

Even worse, Schwartz was very ambivalent about open source some years ago and came out strongly against Linux on various occasions, which didn't help Sun's image at all. It's only now that they're coming to realize that FOSS+Linux isn't really a market competitor in the normal sense, but an all-supporting benefactor to all which should never be disparaged, as it just gives everyone an unpleasant taste. "Go with the flow, ride the wave" is the only sensible and safe way of dealing with a new and colossal public resource, but Sun still seems to be tip-toeing around the pool instead of diving in.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[jamesswift]

What are you mad!? I'm in Australia. I'd get beaten with a dingo's kidney if I mentioned him on a Tuesday!

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[k8to]

Niagra is an interesting platform.. so long as you don't need good disk performance (latency, especially), or good cpu performance (sparc).

So uh.. I guess they do pretty well as webservers. Anything else?

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[davecb]

App server as you might guess, and databases with SAN storage.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[k8to]

Some database applications need low latency, while others are okay with just bandwidth.

The thing is, once you've got a quality SAN, you don't really need the Niagra anymore. x86 boxes will do.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[EvilAlphonso]

competent Professional Services.

Ex-Sun PS talking...
That may depend on your location. In some countries, PS is staffed with the cheapest contractors available. I was having a few pints with an ex customer last week and the service they have received from Sun PS in the last 3 years is appalling. Hint to Sun: if the daily rate you offer is inferior to what the contractor can expect as an employee, don't expect miracles.

How they managed to avoid lawsuits for breach of contract for so long is a mystery to me.

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[davecb]

Sure, until you get something reasonably large. I'm a capacity planner, and small customers for me have 28-36 CPUs, so they're running IBM, Sun or H-P gear.

Also, large numbers of dispatchable threads are really good when you're under what one of my colleagues calls "a normal overload". The latency growth of a T5240 is much more gentle than a much faster X64 machine, so it handles really evil loads well.

To be fair, a lot of x64 threads would be the best possible case, but I don't think even my richer customers would put in a beowulf cluster for an app server (;-))

--dave

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[k8to]

I have always either worked with problem domains that are inherently distributable, or carefully architected the solution so that it would be distributable. For the problems where scaling was a concern.

Sure you can have a nice niagra. Well, it costs more than distributing across a bunch of x86-64 machines, and it's higher latency, and you can afford to not use erlang or mpi or whatever makes sense for your problem domain. Now you need to grow beyond the single niagra. Um. ouch?

Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz

[davecb]

So I buy a dual or quad-socket box, rather than a single one, for the class of (database) app that doesn't scale well horizontally.

If it does scale horizontally, I have the choice of x86-64 or RISC, whichever gives me the best bang for the buck, always assuming datacenter-quality hardware. For good x86s, the cost are substantially higher than white-box equipment, so my customers often find that IBM, Sun or HP machines yields them a cost saving.

In the specific case of the Sun Niagara, I see a particular database transaction set take 1.8 seconds on average, versus 1.3 with a faster non-threaded multi-core processor, and the drop-off in performance under load (the infamous "hockey-stick" curve) is substantially less with the threaded machine. And it's about 20% cheaper to buy and in TCO.

As always, different cases yield different answers. For something parallellizable and for which individual-node failure and recovery is fine, one should use a Google-style solution, with lots of x86s and a retire-on-failure policy.

--dave

"Branding space?" Really?

[nysus]

I think people are weary of euphemisms and see right through them. What people are looking for these days is a little honesty. I suggest "shit content zones".

Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is both laying off 6,000 people (which will significantly impact vital groups that provide support and engineering for major customer contracts who are already short staffed) AND freezing all salary raises for FY09.

Thank god this is coming after Schwartz already got his $11,000,000 bonus for the reverse stock split that saw Sun lose 85% of its value in just over a year. Thank GOD Schwartz still gets his $60,000 per year stipend for his chauffer. Thank GOD Schwartz has nothing to worry about and can address every problem with more layoffs just as Sun has continued to do since 2001.

Sun has laid off more people since 2001 than currently work at the company. The problem is, they NEED those people and wind up hiring a lot of them back. So the layoffs are constantly necessary to appease wallstreet.

Sun will fire 6,000 people. They will take a $700m charge for this. That will screw up their numbers (like it does every quarter and year) which will further anger wallstreet and devalue Sun in their eyes. And they'll hire a lot of people back in that time. So to appease wallstreet for the negative numbers partially caused by the charge-off for layoff costs, they'll lay off more people. And get back to the number of employees they had just prior to the last layoff. And then they'll take another charge. And then repeat the cycle.

They've done this for most of a decade. It is nothing new.

BUT THANK GOD JONOTHAN SCHWARTZ WILL STILL AFFORD SHAMPOO FOR HIS PONYTAIL AND A CHAUFFER FOR HIS DAILY COMMUTE!

Re:Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Sun, and I suspect that you do, too. I'm an "individual contributor" and I have nothing to do with management. Nor do I own any Sun stock.

Since I can't give you the Flamebait mod you deserve - since you should and do know better - I'll point out a couple of things for the benefit of those playing along at home.

The cuts are not likely to come from "vital groups that provide support and engineering for major customer contracts". That would be suicidal; Schwartz, Green, and others at the upper levels have said as much. They are more likely to come from areas that are consistently failing to meet targets or provide cashflow. Software, support, and allied services currently stand the best chance of generating near-term revenue.

And I'm sorry you're so upset that you won't be getting a pay rise this year. Guess what? I won't, either! But you don't see me bitching about it. WTF do you expect? "We're having a major downturn, here's your hefty salary increase"?

If you want to keep your job, you'd better quit whingeing about how you're not getting rich as quickly as you might like and that you're not going to be able to expense quite so many lattÃs as you've been, quit worrying about what Jonathan Schwartz' ponytail is having for breakfast, and start doing something to generate value for the company and customers, because if you can't show that you are, you're going to walk.

Here's a tip: If you're not doing something relating to software or support, get your arse over there and start doing something with a demonstrable benefit to the firm's bottom line ASAP.

Re:Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least!

[mevets]

....Green, and others at the upper levels have said as much...

I don't work at Sun, but I believe Rich Green is leaving, again. Maybe the others didn't agree.

Re:Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least!

[pbhj]

WTF do you expect? "We're having a major downturn, here's your hefty salary increase"?

$11 million sounds like quite a large bonus - that's gotta be a smack in the face for all Sun employees if the company is saying they can't afford to give them an inflationary pay increase. I bet there are people working harder at Sun than the CEO, the myth that managers work harder/deserve more money than others needs to die. You can't blame an employee for being angry at that.

Incidentally share holders couldn't care less (on the whole) about "value". They care about short-term monetary profit, nothing else. If you're an uber coder that produces great products it doesn't matter - you can probably be forced to work faster and produce poorer code that will still sell.

Why they won't apply these principles to the executives I don't know.

Re:Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least!

[Anonymous Coward]

If Sun wants to save Solaris then they should port it to the Hurd microkernel as a services that run on the Hurd microkernel. That's the future of the GNU/Linux operating system. It's more secure and faster and can support more than one system at the same time. Linux is in danger of being taken over by special interests that want to control the direction the kernel is taking.

You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[HBI]

What a piece of crap these things are. There are two big problems:

1. Build quality. They have a small power switch and LED board mounted near the left front that is activated by a pen. Invariably, people press it too hard and destroy the switch, which results in a nonbooting server. But the boards are service parts (they probably are worth 10 or 15 bucks tops) and cannot be purchased in bulk. I mean, i'd be ok with this if we could buy 20 or 50 of them and keep them on hand. They're not so hard to replace. But WTF. I mean, people with little physical strength can render the server inoperable.

The front panels fall off regularly, the optical drive bezels might as well be scotch taped on. Video hardware is chancy and may not work in some cases. I have over 50 of these things so I know whereof I speak, bought in several waves. I mean, if this was Dell i'd understand, their stuff is cheap. But this server is not cheap!

Anyway Sun warranty service is also pretty slow to respond to us, though they do eventually fix the problems, at the cost of devices being out of action for significant stretches of time.

2. Poor integration and poor choices for third party parts. For instance, PXE booting on all four included NICs must execute during bootup. No disabling this is possible. Dell used to do this shit too, but at least Dell was cheap. The x4100 is expensive for an x86 server of its meager specifications.

In addition, the RAID controller is an utter piece of garbage. Most RAID controllers - think Dell PERCs, or HP/Compaq Smart controllers, will treat the disk array as a set of disks that can be transported between servers as a unit, and will be read by the controller as the same unit regardless of the system it is put in. Not so the Sun DPT controller. It apparently stores the RAID config in flash on the card or something, so when you move the disks between systems it basically refuses to recognize the array as a unit. You pretty much have to perform a recovery on the first disk of a RAID 1 set and then reintegrate the second drive, which is a scary prospect when you have data you care about and time is of the essence.

Why DPT of all vendors, anyway? And why did DPT screw the pooch so bad with this one? They have perfectly workable RAID controllers that do not have this flaw. Oh and the controller is dog slow too.

Anyway, they got the contract for a particular large government agency's servers for a particularly large program, so that's why I have the things and they keep getting airdropped on me. I'd like to shitcan them all but I have to make the ones that aren't broken at any given time work until they finally get EOL'd. Hopefully soon.

But yeah, i'll never even look at Sun gear again.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you managed to buy a Sun Fire, consider yourself lucky!

I spent 5 weeks researching what I wanted (in the UK), until I finally narrowed all brands and models down to just the Sun Fire X2100 M2 on merit of specs. I'm not a big buyer, but I could have bought several if the first one proved good.

Then I spent over a week trying to get Sun UK to take my money, to no avail.

The Sun quotations system is broken, their salesforce doesn't phone back, there is no relationship between Sun online figures and those of their resellers, the resellers' sites are an utter mish mash of totally non-uniform crap where you can't find anything and you have to have to start your research from scratch, the resellers stock is threadbare (no I don't want to wait a week while you get an option in from Sun), and the reseller system itself is so disastrous that, in effect, unless you have a major corporate business account, there is no outlet for Sun equipment in the UK. I finally gave up the torment, and after an hour online, I bought a few more Dells.

A company that doesn't want to take my money deserves to die. Period.

Message to Sun Sales: learn from Dell how to sell hardware.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[Kent Recal]

Why is it that stupid people always put the blame on the vendor. There must be a pattern in there...
We have over 50 xfires (4100s, 4200s, 4600s) in production, so I feel an obligation to comment on this drivel.

1. If you really have mouthbreathers on your team that manage to break a server with the pen switch (of all things!) then you have much bigger problems to worry about. I see no difference between the pen-switch design that Sun uses and the stuff that you find on Supermicro or Dell Chassis everywhere. So better keep your "people" far away from those, too...
2. I don't buy your "front panels falling off" story either. I have no idea what the hell you guys are doing to your servers (curling them through the datacenter?) but anyone who has worked with xfire hardware can attest that design and build are generally stellar, no less. Just by looking at the picture I can only wonder what part of the panel is coming off on your xfires, and how?
3. I cannot comment on the video hardware problems that you were having, other than that we never had a problem with that. Our xfires are generally dead-on-arrival (yes, that happens with sun, too) or work flawlessly. So far we had only two 4200s make it through the burn-in but fail later on (flakey PSU, flimsy backplane respectively) which is a pretty good ratio when compared to our expiriences with supermicro hardware.
4. Yes, PXE booting can be disabled for each individual NIC. Read the manual sometime?
5. You're saying you have "over 50" xfires, yet you keep buying a raid controller that sucks? Honestly, if I were your boss...

Sorry, either you're just making up shit here or you're the wrong guy for the job.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking the pen switch renders the server unbootable, eh? Ever try powering on through ssh'ing to the service processor or going through the iLOM web interface?

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[mejesster]

I have no idea why you're even using the switch. They have a service processor that allows for remote power control, among other things.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[mysidia]

In fact... why use the pin switch? My suggestion is that the pin switch is for emergencies.

One should always use either the Serial management port or the web interface for any routine maintenance.

If a server is about to be powered off, it's a real must to check the serial console history, anyways.

Important servers just don't get powered off frequently; i'm glad they make it hard for some cluebat to do it accidentally, and consider it a great feature of Sun products.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I have we have over 150 in our data center and have NEVER! seen any problems like this. Actually they are the best built and best running boxes in our data center. Yes we have Dell, HP, IBM and Super Micro besides Sun. We like Sun so well we are planning to by more.

The problem with the switch and the front covers sounds like you need to hire some real techs instead of trained apes. Sunfire's are rugged but they are not basket balls and can't be dribbled down the hall.

The switch is the same as the ones that come on IBM E-Servers. You have to use a pen. Yes this is a pain in the ass switch BUT! out of over 200 servers (some are IBM) we haven't broken a single switch. Did you ever try to shell into the server and type "poweroff"? We never use the switches even on the Dells with big buttons.

Oh maybe your a Microsoftie with a hung OS on the Sunfire box and have no shell prompt. Normally we are in the back of the box and we just pull the power cable and then plug it back up. There's also this wonderful management OS on the management port that will let you install a new OS from afar or cold boot a hung server even running MS. I have an Intern slide the box in the rack and hook it up and I install the OS and configure the machine from 30 miles away. He doesn't even need to hit that little switch I can power it up with the management port with either ssh or http. Try that with an IBM or Dell box. Again why screw with the dinky switch. Oh you didn't read the manual and didn't know what those two extra CAT5 ports were for.

For the PXE boot try reading the manual sometime. You can turn that off in the bios. Most likely NOT reading the manual is the reason you broke the front bezel while trying to get it off.

Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server

[Blackknight]

Why would you even need a raid controller? ZFS takes care of that for you.

Post dotBOOM

[DrYak]

I remember Sun adverts during the dot-com boom days that mocked IBM for having a huge range of stuff, where as Sun sold only one simple stack of stuff- theirs.

That was during the dot-com. After the dotBOOM, the only companies that survived are those who sell solutions.

OpenSolaris Advantages

[Ralish]

OpenSolaris has all the advantages of Solaris 10 and more. So you're looking at things such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, etc..., that are already in Solaris, as well as entirely new things not yet in Solaris, such as a much improved and more user friendly installation system.

OpenSolaris is basically to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's the cutting edge of Solaris development, with numerous Solaris devs contributing to it; it's an incubation ground. As the features mature and the bugs are ironed out, key features are then moved into Solaris, which is expected to be deployed on servers, mission critical systems, mainframes, and so on. Only recently did Solaris gain the ability to boot off a ZFS root fs for instance, but OpenSolaris has had that capability for quite some time.

If you're interested in Solaris, OpenSolaris is the way to go, as you're less likely to be worried about some minor bugs and more interested in seeing everything it has to offer, including the cutting edge. I'd recommend you review the Solaris and OpenSolaris wikipedia pages for a good overview, which can link to more in-depth information on some of the specific features I mentioned above.

Re:OpenSolaris Advantages

[Blackknight]

Actually for some things you want SXCE(Solaris Express), it's closer to Solaris 10 and includes more packages.

I had to install SXCE for AVS (which rocks) and xvm support (Xen) is included as well.

Sun doesn't understand marketing.

[Futurepower(R)]

Sun has always been TERRIBLE at marketing.

But I thought this economy was killing os!?

[pcjunky]

A recent /. story touted that this economy was going to kill open source because everyone was going to want to get paid for their work.

First they say the economy was going to kill OS, now they say it's helping. This does not compute! Circuits overloading....this does not compute......Hiss... bang...smoke.

Re:But I thought this economy was killing os!?

[Paradise Pete]

First they say the economy was going to kill OS, now they say it's helping. This does not compute!

I'm guessing at least one of those is wrong.

Please fix the goddamn tags CSS on front Page

[Anonymous Coward]

What insane web browser are the Slashdot web designers using that makes them think that the Stylesheet that displays front page tags is working in Firefox, Safari, or Opera.

It has to be IE that it displays correctly but, I'm sorry but I'm out of browsers that I will put up with to render this shit.

I'm a software developer, and a lot of my applications use html/css for display, and I spend a hell of a lot of time making sure my shit works in IE, FF, Opera, Safari, Chrome. I *HATE* IE, but that doesn't mean I don't *make it work* somehow. It is a shitty job, but Slashdot you are not exempt from this bullshit, especially if you do not at least working in god damn Firefox or Webkit.

Take the afternoon out and fucking fix it.

Re:Please fix the goddamn tags CSS on front Page

[gatkinso]

Doesn't always work on IE either, so quityerbitchin (or atleast direct it to where it should be directed, which is not at IE but rather at the lame developers who hacked this POS).

Newsflash

[fortapocalypse]

Sun's approval rating drops by 15% - 18% today.

"but CEO Jonathan Schwartz contends users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun's GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress."

So, during a time of economic stress people will just be crawling over themselves to pay for MySQL, OpenSolaris, and GlassFish when the reason they would use those during such a time would be that they are free?

Well, they didn't go to the government ...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

... like everyone seems to be doing these days.

Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business.

No, they need help from the government, so they can throw YOUR money away! (Sorry, I tend to get cranky after reading "The Economist" these days.)

Maybe this Open Source Strategy will work for Detroit:

"(ring) Hello, President Obama here. Oh, Hi GM. What? You want how many BILLIONS? Get yourself Open Source! Good-Bye! (slam)"

MySQL and charging people

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not start actually charging all the people who've been using MySQL and not paying?

Re:MySQL and charging people

[Sxooter]

Maybe because as long as they're complying with the GPL they don't owe them any money?

What is the point exactly?

[LaughingCoder]

In moving to cut its current workforce by between 15% and 18% today, Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife.

What does it mean for a company to "survive" if it lays off most of its employees? I don't see what the point is.

I've often thought about this notion of a company's lifespan. Where is it written that companies should live forever? They are made up of people with finite lifespans. Companies clearly go through similar "life" phases: enthusiasm of youth, conservatism of middle age, fatigue of old age. It would be interesting to know what the average lifespan of a company is in each country. We calculate this all the time for people.

Re:What is the point exactly?

[mevets]

The 'stay ahead of a falling knife' is a misplaced metaphor; 'chewing off a leg to escape a trap' may be more appropriate.

Sun is a huge company, that employs lots of people both directly and indirectly. Sun has contributed greatly to the computing world; and been well compensated for those contributions. It appears they overextended themselves, and face two choices: find a sustainable core to continue on, or sell whatever is left.

There is a point to the survival, but - to borrow from the Solaris 8-ball - "Outlook not so good".

-----
For all of my adult life I have been really afraid of your country.

Re:What is the point exactly?

[pbhj]

In moving to cut its current workforce by between 15% and 18% today, Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife.

What does it mean for a company to "survive" if it lays off most of its employees? I don't see what the point is.

I think they mean [simplistically] that it continues to employ the poorer working to make profits for the wealthy elite. That's "survival".

Re:What is the point exactly?

[ColdWetDog]

There is a point to the survival, but - to borrow from the Solaris 8-ball - "Outlook not so good".

Just to bring you back on topic, we're not talking about Microsoft here.

Re: integrator as well as builder

[davecb]

Sun mostly sells hardware, and adds anything whatsoever the customer needs to build a solution. This includes software, obviously, but also cisco gear, racks, UPSs and the like.

--dave (biased, you understand) c-b

Actually

[WindBourne]

I have been amazed that they are not in MicroCenter or fry's with OO, mysql, or even solaris. Put these on DVDs, buy the shelf space in the Windows area as well as Linux area. Think about what they spend today on ads. This is MUCH cheaper.

No branding

[gatkinso]

Since OO is FOSS, someone will simply fork the code with all that crap commented out.

Re:No branding

[Anonymous Coward]

What they meant was that there would be products like "Dell Office", not openoffice turning into PITAware.

Re:Strategy, here's one

[uassholes]

You can create zones (like BSD jails), which are not limited to running Solaris apps:

(From the lx man page)

The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS 3.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution inside a non-global zone. The brand supports the execution of 32-bit Linux applications on x86/x64 machines running the Solaris system in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode. The lx brand emulates the system call interfaces provided by the Linux 2.4.21 kernel, as modified by Red Hat in the RHEL 3.x distributions. This kernel provides the system call interfaces consumed by the glibc version 2.3.2 released by Red Hat.

A new Fork of OO

[nurb432]

Sounds like a new fork of OO is needed, one that is 'ad-free'.

Re:A new Fork of OO

[erikina]

Yes. Let's bite the hand that feeds us.

I for one am thankful to be able to use a capable office suite in Linux. I'd be more than happy to look at un-obnoxiousness advertising. Just as I'm happy to look at ads in gmail. But I'll draw a line at putting ads *in* my documents. If they try that, I'll start using MS Office + a VM or run KOffice (Although, I'm sure that Novell OO.o patch would remove it anyway).

Sun is done.

[Organic Brain Damage]

They cannot compete with lower cost alternatives. The broad acceptance of the web and the victory of scale-out over scale-up has destroyed their market. They have the best buggy whip, only nobody wants a buggy whip these days. We all want racks of interchange-able throw-away blades. And there's no way Sun competes in that market. They're as dead as Cray, DEC, SGI and Data General. They just don't know it yet.

Re:Sun is done.

[uassholes]

Computing had a bright future. Now all we're left with are the lowest common denominators: x86 and windows.

Opensolaris is substantially more stable

[nurb432]

And FreeBSD is more stable ( and arguably mature ) then OpenSolaris. If SUN becomes pain in the butt, then people will move away from them. As long as there is still competition, you cant just sit on your laurels.

Re:Opensolaris is substantially more stable

[Anonymous Coward]

And FreeBSD is more stable ( and arguably mature ) then OpenSolaris.

Maybe.. but talk to me when FreeBSD handles 128 processors in the same box and can handle them effectively.

I like Sun's strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been very impressed with Sun's strategy of late, and I hope they don't let short term interests stand in the way of their long term vision. Look at their latest storage appliance, for example. Because of their open source strategy, the entire software stack has commoditized, so they can provide a storage appliance without the overhead many other vendors must add on. Plus they have done some very innovative work with their OS and ZFS, so they can offer a solution that does really cool things that no-one else can offer.

As a customer, I'm absolutely drawn to consider Sun for my hardware needs before other vendors. It's clear that from the top down, they understand the way business operates these days. While other vendors play lip service to any and every trend in the business, Sun really "gets it", so I feel like I can trust them to help me get where I want to go without scheming to hook me on a bunch of shit that has nothing to do with their schmoozy marketing schtick (I'm looking at you IBM).

I would love to work at Sun. I would love to have enough extra cash to buy lots of Sun stock. Sun today is where Apple was a few years ago before Jobs came back and reinvigorated the company. Sun's bottom line is connected to the economy like everyone else's, but they are also bottoming out because they are in the middle of reinventing themselves. I like what I see, and I'm confident that if shareholders can keep their panties unbunched long enough to let Schwartz's strategy unfold, they will be very happy indeed.

Way to miss OP's point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to miss the parent's point. He wasn't complaining that there are no raises this year. His complaint was that a guy whose only contribution was to do a reverse stock split cosmetic alteration that resulted in more layoffs and massive reduction in value of the stock to pre-split prices did NOT get a raise freeze.

I used to work at Sun too and it was typical that someone would be laid off and hired back. If you're not going to maintain staff cuts then all you're doing is making press today and eating layoff charges tomorrow. I left because I was tired of being painfully understaffed. I DID work in software at Sun for a decade and in the last few years saw a lot of people laid off with no way to arrange staffing to fill their vacancy. There are no sacred cows at Sun. Even if you don't have enough staff to meet obligations.

Never hear from Sun anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always been suprised how little I hear about sun despite using their software all the time. I really don't think they know how to do commercial advertising.
Anyone have a Grandmother who has heard of Sun? A Mom who knows they make something for her computer? A sister who knows that bejeweled runs on Java?

Outside of Star Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I have ever seen a Sun anything just sitting on a shelf or rack for sale. I've seen IBM, Apple, HP, etc, etc over the years. They are limiting themselves to 1% of the planet's population when they try to sell anything, the business "computer fleet" sales segment. Granted, that's a pricey segment, but it is still 1% of the population. Where is a Sun branded competitive desktop or laptop or netbook or SOHO server or even a PDA/smartphone for sale at any retail place? Where is an advertising campaign to direct joe public to their site to try and wade through to find something for sale? Where is any Sun software for sale on the shelf at some retail place? Now I wouldn't expect to see any 100 grand to million buck computer sitting on the retail rack, but there is all the other stuff that can be sold in computer-land. Hottest segment of consumer spending lately oncompiters, advanced smartphones and netbooks..Sun doesn't even have one even if you go to their site. They have no wider mass market presence of any note, and seems like you need to cover every possible base in this economy, grab your nickles where you can. If people can't even *see* your stuff for sale, why golly gee, they aren't going to be buying it. Their big stuff gets sold, but their medium stuff starts to get rare, and they have no small computing needs, even though that is a two billion person plus market globally and rising fast. Bad car/vehicle analogy, Sun sells SUVs to medium to heavy trucks to fleet purchasers, but they have no regular scooters or motorcycles or commuter cars or family sedans or sports sedans or small pickups, and no dealers lots for anything, nor advertising.

stock price

[Jeff Hornby]

I don't really see a future for Sun. According to this http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081114.wsun1114/BNStory/Technology/home Sun's market cap is below their cash on hand. That makes them ripe for a buyout and breakup.

Re:stock price

[the eric conspiracy]

With the stock market crash there are a LOT of companies like this. The problem is that they are burning through their cash so buying them does no good.

Ads will devalue their asset. None for me!!!

[mattr]

I have contributed to OpenOffice.org (testing) since earlier days. I had to switch away from it in January because trying to pass a contract back and forth with someone who uses MS Office resulted in a corrupted layout. (lots of other problems like that in the past, now I don't know).

Let me just say that as much as I have wished well for OpenOffice and Sun, there is no way at all I would use OpenOffice if it had ads in it. Sure they can make money but just don't put advertising in it. I wouldn't use it for free, and I wouldn't consider buying it either. Sun would use up all the good will it built up with me by trying to make ad dollars off of open source. Money fine. But don't put If that's all the brains they have left, they should start digging their own grave.

Scratching my head

[bangzilla]

Couple of data points:
1. My kids go to school in the Bay Area. Both have an impressive wardrobe of Sun-logo'd t-shirts (the designs are much better that your average "slap-a-logo-on-a-white-T"). While I'm not complaining, why is Sun clothing my children while laying off 5,000 staff?
2. I've been in the computer business for ~25 years. I've done work with Sun in the past (~15 years ago). I can tell you what business Microsoft is in. I can tell you what business HP is in. Ditto Oracle. Heck I even think I could tell you what business IBM is in these days. I have *no* idea what business Sun is in. Oh I know they own some Open Source apps and once upon a time they made computers around the SPARC processor - but what do they do now? How do they intend to make money and return a profit for their shareholders?

Re:Scratching my head

[Anonymous Coward]

They still make SPARC computers. Their latest versions of SPARC processors are quite impressive.

http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp?tab=2

Re:Scratching my head

[k8to]

Sure, SPARC processors offer somewhere between 16-25% of the performance of intel-style processors at similar clockrates at similar prices. That's impressive.

Back in the day..

[Junta]

Solaris was relatively stagnant feature-wise. This is not a bad thing for Unix, but the company focus of the late 90s included a lot of people who appreciated the moves that Linux was making. Sure, application compatibility across versions was non-trivial, and behaviors got tweaked constantly, but at a given moment by and large they had interesting ideas relative to Sun. So Sun hardware tended to get Linux thrown on it in some circumstances (the Sun hardware was leaps and bounds better than x86 based hardware of the time, excluding crap like the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10).

I was never a fan of HP-UX, and the Itanium move in particular I think screwed them. It's really hard to sell a Unix customer on a total architecture change, as one of the big values of Unix vendors is longevity of the architecture. They were probably sold on Intel's vision that the architecture would become ubiquitous in the desktop market, which of course did not happen.

Sun managed to successfully ride the tech bubble of the late 90s, but as a consequence, they rode it down fairly closely. Much of their customer base went out of business. Many of the rest cut back on IT and went to x86 Linux. Some others didn't feel the benefit of stagnant featureset of Solaris as a good thing, and went to distributions.

SGI killed Irix, ancient history.

Apple is technically a Unix vendor, but they don't quite fit in business wise with the rest.

IBM I think is current king of the Unix hill. AIX seems to have been slow and steady. As much as I don't particularly feel it, the leadership of Unix shops very much get it.

Now Sun seems the be reinventing their product portfolio. For a while, they seemed to de-emphasive Solaris for their Linux efforts, and then returned. Now they are trying to replicate the success with Linux, but with Solaris. They have successfully gotten things like ZFS and DTrace ingrained in the hearts and minds of the technical community as interesting features. Ian was a fantastic choice for architect, as he really got package repository first, and everything else has been imitating his implementation.

Now the problem they face is whether they can overcome Linux. I think they recognize the AIX owned slice as too difficult as the base is too risk adverse to jump ship readily. Overall, it makes sense to chase Linux, as those customers tend to be more willing to try new things. Howerver, the technical gains they made were only through their direct funding (ZFS in particular has sucessfully been seen as a unique, useful technology outside of OSes run on NAS systems). Laying off 6,000 now to bank on community support is way premature, they just don't have a solution with enough suport behind it to pull that sort of move.

This is very sad

[Anonymous Coward]

to see such a big, historic player go down. Sun had, and probably still has, some incredibly smart people. I think the combo of Sparc and Solaris, which for years could scale and take load without breaking a sweat in environments that would crush the Linux kernel, was a tech landmark.

It's extraordinarily hard to make it work when you control hardware and software. It's easy to be blinded by your own success. Sometimes it takes a near-death experience to rejuvenate a company, as it did Apple. Apple controlled hardware and OS, they still do now having used the unfettered BSD license to get the guts they needed. But they had the iMac and then the iPod to print money for them while OS X was improved. And they had Jobs. Sun didn't have Jobs; they had McNeeley, the Typhoid Annie of Tech.

Schwartz is fighting the good fight but the foundation for the disaster was laid down years ago by McNeeley. A grand company goes under and good people lose their jobs but as always the brass still play golf at Pebble Beach.

I hope Sun pulls it off; Linux (which I don't use), would be the better for it.

Niagara servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Suns long term (5-10 year) prospects just don't look good. Their core of products are all up against strong competition. The Sparc architecture is not significantly better than x86-64 to justify the additional cost and "non-standard" architecture to buyers ....

Try their Niagara servers on highly parallel workloads, at a fraction of the power requirements for x86. Trust me, it's better in quite a few places.

More OpenOffice please

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I don't know what portion of the OpenOffice developers work for Sun, but I'll bet it's a lot. And that's got to change. This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).

Red Hat? Novell? CANONICAL?? You've got to saturate this project with developers. Without it, desktop Linux is dead in the water. And yes, desktop Linux is real, today, despite what detractors say. Take that away and Linux slowly sinks in other areas too.

And I agree with whoever suggested that they need to get the product out in front of more Joe Sixpak types. Press a bunch of CD's and hand them out like candy. It worked for AOL back in the day. We've got to get to a point where everyone's got "one of those OpenOffice CD's" lying around, so when they need to get a document together in the middle of the night and they don't have the time, inclination, or source media to get an MS Office install together, the little light bulb comes on over their head, they toss in the OpenOffice CD, and we have one more user.

And of course the preload market needs to be saturated with OpenOffice. Every new PC needs to have a copy of OpenOffice preloaded. As the price of computers continues to come down, this could be the key to keeping that price point down. I'm sure Microsoft is really going to turn the screws on this one, but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.

For 90% of the users out there, OpenOffice is MS Office's equal. It's time to really push push push to get it out in front of them.

Re:More OpenOffice please

[jmorris42]

> ..but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.

Sorry, that isn't being bold. Taking a cattle prod to Microsoft isn't bravery, more like suicide. And preloading OO.o is exactly that, you would be directly threatening their biggest cash cow. Do it and you will find yourself buying your OWM copies of Windows from Ingram Micro at rack rate, which is intended to be a price to kill any OEM doing more than a couple hundred units a month. If you can't negotiate a special deal involving co-marketing kickbacks you can't compete against everyone else who does.

Re:More OpenOffice please

[SleepingWaterBear]

This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).

I'm not sure throwing more man hours at OpenOffice is really the solution. In my opinion, Microsoft Office is at its core poorly designed, and poorly executed. OOo strives to be an MS Office replacement, but even if it manages to do everything MS Office does better and faster, it will still be mediocre.

This is a little off topic, but what I think we really need is an open standard for office program integration so that one group can make a spreadsheet, another can make a wordprocessor, and you can be guaranteed interoperability. That way developers would be able to experiment with different approaches for various components, or even mix and match, and still compete with MS.

Re:More OpenOffice please

[Kadin2048]

A very good point.

In a lot of ways I think Linux in general -- at least, "Desktop Linux" -- is held back by the same mode of thinking. There are a lot of people trying to copy Microsoft, and that just isn't going to work. You can't out-Windows Windows, (or Office). You can try, and you can perhaps even get very close, but you're inherently setting yourself up for failure: the "real thing" will always be what's being emulated, and users will pick up on that and realize they're getting something that's inherently second-rate.

The areas where Linux really leads are mostly in areas where, as a platform and in general, it doesn't try to blindly emulate Microsoft behavior, and does what's really best.

In my experience anyway, the attractiveness of 'clone' applications is overestimated by developers; users are generally quite willing to learn something new, be it an application or a workflow/process, if the new thing is obviously superior in a meaningful way ("meaningful" as in "makes their job easier"). People do this all the time; when you run into resistance is when there's relearning for no obvious gain (e.g. Office 2007).

Re:More OpenOffice please

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure throwing more man hours at OpenOffice is really the solution.

Current lack of man-hours isn't the problem. Lack of man-hours if Sun goes under is the problem.

Some key points you forgot to mention

[btarval]

Thank goodness you're not a moderator. The OPs points about Schwartz are spot on.

You also conveniently left out a couple key points about Sun. First, they consistently pay lower salaries than others. Oh yes, I know that they trot out the usual Marketing BS about the Salary Surveys that they buy. But compare that to real job offers from other places in the Valley, and Sun is always a low-baller.

Sun also has a long track record of offing employees for H1-Bs; a record which is so bad that it's documented externally.

In short, Sun uses low-ball labor to get things done. That's part of the reason why they are in this mess. Yes, they do have some exceptional talent here and there. That's certainly in the minority, and the real work gets done by people who are typically far less talented than their peers in other companies.

Which is a pity, because Sun used to be a great place. Until they recognize that they have to pay for good talent, and not the dumbest and cheapest, they are going to continue to go nowhere.

And that's a pity, because as I'm sure you know, they now have the opportunity to kick even IBM's rear in a serious fashion if they played their cards right. But it doesn't look to me like they are.

Re:Some key points you forgot to mention

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting point about pay, I work for IBM and they give us the same shit about salary surveys, yet we know that our salaries are quite a bit lower than Google or especially Microsoft. Of course not all IBMers could go to places like that. Personally I am good enough so I leaving soon to take up a job offer from one of those two (posting anonymously and not being too specific so as to not become identifiable). IBM claims it has pay for performance but in reality everyone is paid about the same as a function of how long you have been there. So it makes no sense for the top performers to stay. I suspect that soon IBM will be in the same trouble as Sun as its business is quite similar. Right now they are trying all kinds of cost cutting measures, but not as extreme as firing people, yet.

Sun and tunnelvision ?

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all a disclaimer: I am a very big Sun supporter. My whole *nix career started with a Solaris training after which I started using Linux to keep my newly gained *nix experiences up to date. When it comes to Unix(-like) environments my main preferred choices are Solaris and Linux.

Still, having said that I can't help worry that Sun doesn't let the whole open source thing bite themselves in their behinds. To me it looks as if they're blindly staring into whatever future they have planned and despite of all seem to be fully sure that no matter what happens: there has to be open source involved.

And I'm really wondering if they don't let the whole OSS thing basicaly undo some of the things which made Sun and their products great in the past. The "its OSS so its good" attitude. An example, though a little biased.. Sun is currently busy pushing their Open Solaris product forward big time. And granted; the environment does indeed look awesome, I really like the idea of having the option to fully utilize ZFS on all used filesystems. And they're also busy pushing this solution forward on Amazon's EC2. You'd think this is the best from both worlds (providing you have a good use for EC2)...

I tried Open Solaris on EC2 and was quite shocked to say the least. I know there is still a seperation between open and regular Solaris but if Open Solaris is the future for Solaris then I don't see a bright future ahead. Its not backwards compatible, it has changed several options which render certain aspect useless, and its awefully easy to break by only using the on-board package manager! Granted; when you look at the (online) documentation you'll soon discover that the whole "pkg" thing is still in beta testing. But for a newly Solaris user on EC2 that won't be so obvious. And the results are that when you use "pkg" to install MySQL5 you'll simply break the whole pkg program due to misplaced libraries. "Anyone can distributed software packages", yeah right.

And now I have to wonder.. IMO this isn't really helping Sun's reputation, especially since they're also trying to sell support contracts for these products. That might make you think that they believe the environment as a whole is stable enough, a thing to which I disagree. BUT.. It is open source...

And when reading articles like these I can't help wonder and I really hope Sun doesn't let this OSS thing bite them in their ass. Open Source is a very useful development, IF and only if used properly.

Overreact much?

[itomato]

Advertisements. On your documents. Your important documents..

Do you think *anyone* would be open to this? Sun's board above all?

"Let's really screw ourselves and any chance we have to have OOo float.. How about selling ad space on people's documents! It works like the specialized coupon printers at the Grocers'!"

"If Writer detects a keyword, 'overdue', for example, it sticks an ad for Accenture in the footer!"

"Genius!"

"Brilliant!"

"Capital Idea!"

Take a breath.. Imagine a branded OpenOffice, as in the case of Novell. There's hardly a mention of "Sun".

Open Source != Free

[itomato]

Giving stuff away happens when things are "Free" as in beer.

Making things available happens when things are "Free" as in Freedom.

Java has been free like beer for ages. Coincidentally, SUNW/JAVA stock values were higher than they are today.

Free stuff attracts people. Microsoft wins developer mindshare with free or ridiculously low-cost software development tools. College students learn what they can afford to learn.

Free stuff up front with paid support to be delivered in the future is the way things seem to be going.

"Here's this thing.. Have fun with it! If you need help, it will cost you. Good luck!"

Re:Open Source != Free

[jd]

You are correct, but nobody is going to buy a distro for an Ultrasparc IV (unless there's a LOT of support behind it) and there's a limit to how many who download from their site who will then buy their hardware. Sun has done some amazing things for Open Source (such as opening up the source to their microprocessors, although I still think placing the code on Open Cores would be smart, and they're not exactly forthcoming as to how the community has responded), but ultimately their core survival depends on shifting Big Ticket items. You'd have to sell a LOT of Solaris or Linux CDs to compare with the net profit obtained by shipping even a single T2-based server blade.

This does not mean backing away from Open Source. Far from it. Software is expensive to maintain, generates relatively little revenue and Sun's acceptance of Open Source clearly demonstrates they can no longer compete in that market. What Sun really needs to do is switch their software efforts from original development to QA, porting and optimization, and to gear up where they can weather the storm. IBM has done remarkably well by leveraging their skills in processors to produce low-end chips like the PPC, PPC64 and Cell. A server processor might not be viable for a mobile phone, but I'm willing to bet they could produce a version that was easier to write for than a Cell and better at the bus-intensive operations needed by MMORGs and other modern games than the ix86 architecture, which means they should be able to produce something that could compete in the flourishing console markets (which is what IBM is trying to do with the Cell). Since servers are bus-intensive and it's more important to shove data at the GPUs (which can do all the serious maths these days better than CPUs), starting with a CPU that is designed for massive data processing than one designed for massive number crunching would seem logical enough.

I don't seriously believe Sun can survive if they stay so deeply enmeshed in software, as it is only in hardware that they are distinct and only in hardware that they really have any advantage.

Re:Open Source != Free

[Miamicanes]

> Java has been free like beer for ages.

Sort of. Java is free if the end user downloads it directly from Sun and install it himself. If you want to distribute Java along with your own Java-based application in a way that seamlessly installs or updates the JVM if the end user doesn't already have it, you have to pay licensing fees to Sun. Very, very EXPENSIVE licensing fees.

Now... for Slashdot users, yes... Java is free like beer. Downloading and installing it is no big deal, if it hasn't already been done long ago. For J6P and his PHB, it's nontrivial. It's actually a brilliant strategy by Sun. They set the bar for getting it "free" SO LOW that anyone with half a brain and even the most trivial bit of computer knowledge can do it... but as we all know, there are plenty of people for whom that's literally an insurmountable barrier. It also means you can't distribute turnkey solutions based on Java without paying licensing fees. Sun makes quite a bit of money from licensees who developed apps all the way to the point where they were ready to sell, only to discover at the last moment that Java isn't quite as "free" as they thought it was.

Ditto, for MySQL. As long as the end user personally downloads and installs it, it's free. The moment it ends up integrated into your installer, or ships already installed, you have to pay.

Of course, distributing your OWN application as open-source might be enough of a loophole to distribute it together with Java and/or MySQL (or at least an installer that automates its download from Sun and subsequent installation), but once again, it's a surprisingly effective requirement that filters out most real-world commercial scenarios. You can either distribute your application under the GPL, or pay immense licensing fees to Sun.

Personally, I think Sun's management is insane to even THINK about laying off that many employees just to appease the angry gods of Wall Street. And I own lots of largely symbolic stock in Sun that's worth about as much as a pallet of Charmin from Sam's Club, so I *have* paid dearly for the right to hold that view. Wall Street doesn't understand that with a company like Sun, their human capital IS a major portion of the company's real worth and value. When those employees walk out the door after being RIF'ed, millions of dollars worth of Sun's most valuable assets will be going up in smoke. I don't think I'm the only one to hold that view. IMHO, half the reason Sun's stock was so badly punished on Friday, contrary to the predictions of most Wall Street analysts, was because the people who really UNDERSTAND companies like Sun took the news the same way someone would take news about a company intentionally and systematically undertaking the destruction of a major part of its capital assets. Frankly, I'd be happier to see Sun's stock fall below a buck, be delisted, and be pink-sheeted for a few years while R&D continues unimpeded, before Sun gets relisted as a more valuable company, than to see its stock price get jacked back up a whopping 50c or so for a few days amidst Wall Street's jubilation over layoffs... before crashing back down to what it would have been anyway without the layoffs and wanton destruction of Sun's real value.

It's almost enough to make me want to encourage people to buy or sell enough Sun stock to end up with some nice binary number of shares (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc) as a way of visibly demonstrating support for Sun's long-term R&D over Wall Street's obsession with quarterly profits. Right now, Sun stock is so cheap, you could almost buy 16 shares for $75 including the brokerage commission... but then again, reading about Sun's apparent internal bureaucracy makes me equally want to just say f**k it, dump my shares for $4.60, and walk away.

Egos and Racism

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, don't forget the egos. These are the ones in the in the ivory towers. If there is a good project amongst engineers elsewhere in the company, they will ensure that it gets a Design Review at Code Review time such that the reviewers get to redo the project, with bells and whistles, and take all the credit.

It helps if the original project didn't start in the USA, because Sun will always protect American jobs over everyone else's.

Linux ain't exactly Enterprise Grade.

[itomato]

No matter what you might believe or have read, Linux is not Enterprise quality software.

We are barely there.

Speaking as an Enterprise Linux architect, the tools and stability of Linux distrubutions are not up to snuff. Sun handily beats Linuxes in this area.

ZFS, Jumpstart, FLARs, package management, patching... The list goes on.

Anyone who suggests FUSE as an option needs to get a clue. Selling NAS isn't always an option, or even viable. Kickstart/AutoYaST are OK for what they are, but the systems management tools are weak. So is their support. Call Redhat with a real stumper. They'll ask you for a sosreport, which you send. When they get it, they'll ask you to divert your energies to some troubleshooting track, and email you back sometime tomorrow, probably as you're getting ready to leave, with some copy-and-pasted errata or bug report that *MIGHT* apply to your situation. If you get a phone call, consider yourself highly fortunate.

RHEL 4, RHEL 5, RHEL 4AS RHEL 4ES, i386/x86_64...

Phooey. Solaris. SPARC? You asked for it, so you need it. You're not likely to whine about it.

pfff....

Re:Linux ain't exactly Enterprise Grade.

[Prof.Phreak]

Define ``Enterprise Grade''? I know plenty of fortune 500 corps that use Linux in pretty critical places (ie: trading and backend systems at many stock exchanges run linux, etc.). Just 'cause there are bugs, doesn't mean that the alternatives don't have bugs.

Re:Linux ain't exactly Enterprise Grade.

[jvillain]

Linux isn't Enterprise grade when it is run by the propriatary "Linux is Unix" momos that then try to run it like what ever OS they happened to know before. Hint pkgadd add doesn't work and adding a pkgadd symlink to up2date or yum is just stupid. I have gone into many companies to clean up the problems with their Linux boxes and the problems are almost always caused by the the admins trying to run their boxs like it is another OS rather than following Linux best practices.

Re:Linux ain't exactly Enterprise Grade.

[Vanders]

No matter what you might believe or have read, Linux is not Enterprise quality software.

The vast number of enterprises running Linux would probably disagree with you. Linux is also the de-facto OS on almost every super computer cluster in the Top 500.

If you'd said "Carrier Grade" then you might have had a point, but it won't be long until someone starts to offer a specialised carrier grade Linux distribution.

Mixed bag..

[Junta]

To me, Sun has never recovered from being dragged down by their success with the '.com' bubble.

They floundered around, not making clear whether they thought their SPARC architecture or x86 was their focus, whether Solaris or Linux was their focus. It basically kept shifting.

I will say I think they currently have an idea of the market they should pursue. They aren't chasing the AIX customer set. Sun definitely lost some Solaris business to AIX as they floundered around, yet they aren't fooling themselves thinking they can win that back. In the Unix world right now, your only choice is to hope the current leader screws up. The Unix world is risk-averse, and it would take a miracle to convert a satisfied Unix shop to anything else.

They know they only have any leverage in the server space, and the most likely customer set to be won over would be Linux adopters. It is here that they can find the highest proportion of customers willing to try new technology. As such they have tried to rally around their Solaris technology and reinvent it to look more like Linux.

I think at the end of the day, OpenSolaris is the hail-mary pass they needed to try. It's risky, but they don't have much to lose anymore, and a lot to gain. I would say it would be bad for IBM to do this for AIX, as they would blow the AIX market in doing so by inducing too much perceived risk to their customers, and so for IBM, a two-tiered AIX/Linux strategy makes sense (though I think IBM fails to correctly capitalize directly on their Linux investment. It's clear they contribute much, but they don't get a unique productized offering derived from that large investment).

I think Sun's relative weakness as a company precluded them from being able to become a leader in the Linux environment. They have some great ideas, but not enough once in the community to preserve a competitive edge. Hence they managed to get ZFS out there in a way Linux companies cannot take advantage of. Yes, DTrace is nice, and Zones are useful, but ZFS is the one technology that is relatively peerless outside of proprietary NAS filesystems. So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.

All that said, I don't have confidence in their chances for success, particularly after being forced to rely on a light community so early. They simply don't have the driver support and as btrfs emerges, the technical interest in ZFS could likely wane. I know btrfs still lacks certain features, but I think it will capture most of the critically interesting features of ZFS.

Re:Mixed bag..

[jmorris42]

> So they are guarding their differentiators carefully by tying it to their platform and hoping the community
> will buy into the cool stuff and flesh out the rest of what they need.

Of course there is one little problem with that idea. Yes if Solaris can be made excellent enough the 'Open Source' crowd might be seduced to USE Solaris. But most lines of code come from either paid developers or Free Software types. The use whatever is best today types aren't likely to be paying many developers. And the Free Software types have apparently been avoiding OpenSolaris in droves, so it is a pretty safe bet they won't be lining up to contribute to Solaris anytime soon. So Sun better not sack their in house developers anytime soon, they are going to be needing them for the forseeable future.

Why windows?

[Junta]

I can buy that growth of non-x86 markets are relatively stagnant, but it seems to me that Linux is still quite healthy.

Re:Why windows?

[uassholes]

I like linux, but I can't decide if it refutes my point or proves it when it's displacing Unixen and other OSes like VMS that are highly developed but not free.

My one thought about IBM & Linux

[Junta]

It's absolutely clear IBM is contributing tons to Open Source. It's easy to note 'ibm.com' addresses in changelogs for tons of projects.

Generic Linux contributions and the success of Linux is key to them. You sell Linux to x86 users, you suddenly have a nice bridge to Linux on POWER. That seems to have been a pillar of their strategy.

While this is a good thought, and they also derive some recognition as general Linux experts, I'm suprised they haven't more directly capitalized on their investment. I would expect IBM to take ownership of a customer-facing distribution, and gain the ability to own the 'whole stack' in the x86 world. This has been their proud marketing message behind their power/mainframe systems, and yet they haven't applied much of that business or technical strategy to their x86 servers. By and large their x86 solutions aren't that much different from everybody else's. Linux could be a good puzzle piece to glue their middleware and hardware together.

Whether the result would be a good product or not, I cannot say, just surprised IBM hasn't done anything so intriguing in the x86 space.

Re:My one thought about IBM & Linux

[Kadin2048]

I've often wondered this also...a few years ago there were reports that IBM was going to do it, and they had an "IBM Desktop Linux" distro waiting in the wings ... and then, nothing. Or basically nothing, what showed up was a modified version of RHEL, I think. It was anticlimactic, to say the least.

The only thing I can come up with is they're still burning from the OS/2 debacle and have an aversion to doing anything that smells like a consumer or desktop operating system. As an organization, I get the feeling they've sworn off that particular segment of the market and put it in the "never again" file.

That doesn't explain why they don't offer a server Linux tailored specifically for their hardware -- maybe just fears that it would cannibalize OS/400 (or whatever they're calling it this week) and z/OS sales? That seems logical, if shortsighted.

A few years ago it would have been massive, but even today I think it would still be significant validation for Linux if IBM actually released a distro themselves. Since a fair bit of their low-end and midrange strategy is focused on Linux, and they have a wide variety of (profitable!) software that runs on Linux, and the near-triviality of assembling a distro, plus the support revenue they'd be able to steal from RedHat or SuSE (that basically every Linux-on-IBM client is paying) ... it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Maybe they're biding their time, but more likely I think it's just the schizophrenia endemic to many large organizations, where there's just nobody in the right place with the right power to do what obviously needs to be done, so everybody instead goes their separate ways.

You guys are missing the point.

[Jane Q. Public]

OpenOffice is essentially the free version of commercial software: StarOffice. As such, it has fewer features and conveniences than StarOffice.

On the other hand, even StarOffice sells for MUCH less that MS Office. It is actually a pretty great deal.

I am aware that they have made OpenOffice its own standalone project now, but maybe that was their mistake.

If Sun wants to monetize things more, they could put those programmers back on the StarOffice team to improve that product, and continue to strip out features for their "free version", OpenOffice. It worked in the past... why not now?

Re:You guys are missing the point.

[jvillain]

They could pull their programmers. But then they wouldn't get the contributions of the non Sun developers. Currently a lot of those submissions are submitted up stream at the request of the distros etc. But that could change quickly and the patches get submitted down stream instead. If they tried to strip out features the code would just get forked. Actually it already has been by Novel and others.

Re:You guys are missing the point.

[Jane Q. Public]

No, you misunderstood me. StarOffice is NOT open source. OpenOffice now is.

Before, OpenOffice was StarOffice with some features stripped out. (Or, from a different point of view, StarOffice was OpenOffice with some commercial value added, much like RedHat was with its free version and Enterprise, before Fedora.)

Sun decided to change their strategy on this. If it caused them suffering, still isn't it their own fault?

RedHat has made this model work. So why not Sun?

here's an idea: sell some products

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Sun's products. But I can't sell them. Sun will not sell to me, nor will their resellers, as the volume of business I would put through is not large enough (around US$100,000 per annum). So, I will continue to recommend and supply IBM hardware.

If they're not willing to sell their fucking products, how do they expect to make sales?

H-1B Workers Destroyed Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The bulk of the engineers in the microprocessor division of Sun Microsystems is former or current holders of the H-1B visa. The reasoning is that they are smarter and work harder than the natives. Since foreign engineers are supposedly willing to work long hours and to sacrifice their family lives, these engineers will build the best products in the industry.

The experience of the last decade has proven the exact opposite to be true. The H-1B engineers at Sun designed and built the fiasco called the UltraSPARC III and the UltraSPARC IV. They were about 4 years late.

By contrast, the SPARC64 was designed and built by only natives. Fujitsu -- like other Japanese companies -- generally refuses to hire foreign engineers. In Japan, only Japanese natives at Fujitsu designed and built the SPARC64 and the powerful servers that use it. The SPARC64 demolished the UltraSPARC III and the UltraSPARC IV in performance. In fact, Sun jettisoned its entire line of "high-end" processors and now re-sells Sun-branded servers designed and built by Fujitsu. These servers use SPARC64 chips.

Sun has also stopped selling UltraSPARC-based workstations. The last such workstations ran on an UltraSPARC III. These workstations were terminated in mid-2008.

David Yen, the former head of processor development at Sun, recently left Sun and joined Juniper. He saw the writing on the wall and made a smart transition.

By the way, the multicore processors that Sun obtained by purchasing Afara were originally designed by Les Kohn. Kohn co-founded Afara. At Afara and (later) at Sun, he lead the development of the 1st-generation multicore processors, Niagara. Niagara was a success.

After Kohn left Sun to work at yet another startup, processor development at Sun declined. Note the huge delay in the development of Rock, the successor to Niagara.

The same pattern of delay occurred earlier in the past 10 years. Around 1995, Kohn lead the development of the UltraSPARC I and II. They were a tremendous success. Then, he left Sun to work at another company.

The development of UltraSPARC III, the successor to the UltraSPARC II, experienced a huge delay. Between UltraSPARC II and UltraSPARC III, there was a huge increase in the number of H-1B engineers.

I suspect the same huge H-1B increase between Niagara and Rock. Hence, Niagara is a success, but Rock is a failure plagued by constant delays and re-scheduling.

I do outsourcing and we see SUN less and less

[gelfling]

I do outsourcing and the amount of SUN HW & SW we see to take over and staff up is soon becoming more of a bother than anything else. Most of non Windows servers that aren't AS/400's or mainframes are HP and AIX. Very little SUN and what is, we work to sunset in the following few years. It's too expensive for us to maintain the skill set and tools for a small pool of what's becoming a custom part of the deal.

Branding????

[shaitand]

'Reader Barence also pointed out that Sun will begin to auction "branding space" in OpenOffice.'

Can you say fork? Does he really think that tossing ads into people's documents/emails/etc is going to HELP OpenOffice's slowly growing marketshare?

3.0, it makes for a nice clean breaking point to fork the project. OO is far too heavily controlled by Sun at this point anyway.

It's Solaris on x86 which seems to be the gamble

[Vengeful weenie]

You can't even buy SPARC workstations new. What is disturbing is that the applications haven't come over with Solaris to x86. Solaris x86 is a very solid implementation, but w/o the apps it going to be a moot point. Has anyone else noticed this?

IBM should by Canonical

[shaka]

IBM should buy Canonical and put Shuttleworth in charge of IBM Desktop & Server Linux Distributions.

Seriously, they could sell a distribution as nice as Ubuntu on good hardware. Focus on laptops, do what Apple is doing with a small range of well-known products.

And steal back the PC market from Microsoft.

Re:Guide To The Barack Obongo Presidency

[badkarmadayaccount]

Seriously, slashdot, get some IP loging in here, I've had it with the ACs! Please!

Propietary solution: ££

[jotaeleemeese]

OpenOffice: free (and one or two adds on your window).

Sorry to burst your righteous bubble, but I am sure they will be takers.