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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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: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.

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: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: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.