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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.
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.
Much as I like open source, giving stuff away is really not what a business that need some cash needs right now.
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?
839*929
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.
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.
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.
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?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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".
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
Sun has always been TERRIBLE at marketing.
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.
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.
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?
... 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)"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Since OO is FOSS, someone will simply fork the code with all that crap commented out.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
(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.
Sounds like a new fork of OO is needed, one that is 'ad-free'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I don't work at Sun, but I believe Rich Green is leaving, again. Maybe the others didn't agree.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
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.
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.
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?
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
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".
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!"
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.
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....
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I can buy that growth of non-x86 markets are relatively stagnant, but it seems to me that Linux is still quite healthy.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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?
Maybe because as long as they're complying with the GPL they don't owe them any money?
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
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.
'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.
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 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.
:wq!
Seriously, slashdot, get some IP loging in here, I've had it with the ACs! Please!
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
OpenOffice: free (and one or two adds on your window).
Sorry to burst your righteous bubble, but I am sure they will be takers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.