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Sun's CEO On FOSS and the Cloud

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-clouds-block-the-sun dept.

ruphus13 writes "Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, 'Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world's most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That's creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities... We announced just last week that we're building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we're able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'" In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called "anti-competitive" by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Still the Cloud? by noundi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First of all it's not something you migrate to in a heartbeat. It takes time and careful consideration. And you're right, not all benefit from it but why should they? Or more importantly, why is it bad unless the majority benefits from it? There are many businesses that would find this to be a good solution. And what goes for central storage, most larger networks often use a similair solution. I have my data on my hard drive, but trust me, if I lose my network connection my data is rendered more or less useless anyway. But the point is you don't build a cloud system and leave space for network outage. If you're very depended on it you make sure there are plan B's and C's and D's.

    --
    I am the lawn!
  2. I agree about the downturn helping (;-)) by davecb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As an Evil Contractor[TM], I usually find a downturn increase both

    • my business, and
    • my customers' interest in low-cost, medium-performance or medium-feature-set solutions.

    --dave

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    davecb@spamcop.net
  3. Re:Still the Cloud? by nine-times · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Preventing vendor lock in. Ensuring privacy of sensitive data. Neither of these is possible with any cloud computing product available.

    I'm decidedly not saying that any "cloud" service currently available is perfect. I'm saying many of the problems are not inherent, but rather could be solved. For example, having fast and reliable ubiquitous Internet access isn't something that Amazon or Google could simply fix. It's an infrastructure problem, and that infrastructure can be improved greatly from its current state.