Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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.
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.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
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?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill