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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.

1 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Remember pen based computing? by MpVpRb · · Score: 0, Redundant

    A few years ago, the tech press became infatuated with the idea of pen based computing. It seemed like every article talked about it. At every press conference, the rep was asked "what's your pen strategy".

    Nobody seemed to notice that it was a bad idea that never quite worked correctly.

    Now, the tech press seems to be focusing on the "cloud".

    It's also a bad idea that doesn't work very well.

    I can imagine a niche where cloud computing fits perfectly, but only a small one.

    Here are my objections...

    Lets say that you depend on a cloud app, or cloud data storage for something important. What could possibly go wrong.

    The provider could go out of business.

    The provider could get hacked.

    The provider could change their pricing or other restrictions.

    The provider could add nasty adware or other annoying stuff.

    The provider could dramatically change the behavior of the app.

    Features you depend on could be removed, or made useless.

    I imagine the nightmare scenario. The deadline is approaching, you go to your cloud app and find out that it operates in a completely different way, requiring several hours of learning, only to find out that it no longer does what you need.

    And...what happens when the net goes down?