Working at Sun I've heard the higher-ups discuss these grants and awards and from what I gather, despite the award money, it is still very expensive for the company. The award money is not enough to fund a competitive entry. IBM definitely has a lot more money to put into the effort than Sun does. Not defending them though. It's a bummer for the company that they didn't get the grant, but I probably agree that losing could be a good thing. Winning would be great for bragging rights and image.
Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about.
What will their new role be at Sun? First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.
Will they work on JRuby full time? Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.
Will JRuby be "owned" by Sun? No. JRuby has existed for a long time as a project; it has its own culture, community, license, and codebase, and there are no plans for significant changes.
And here's the opensolaris.org tools forum/mailing-list where the revision control decision was discussed. Besides Mercurial, several other tools were considered. This was all done out in the open.
I think IBM's comments are really meant to impose FUD. If you look into the project I think you undoubtedly will see that it is open now. As more time passes and, for example, the external contribution mechanism is streamlined with the move to Mercurial, I think it will *appear* open without question to outsiders and silly handline grabbing IBM fud-filled comments will not even make slashdot.
Of course, when it comes to raw transactional throughput, your average E10K running Solaris and Oracle just doesn't hold a candle to, say, an IBM z9 Enterprise Class running z/OS and DB2.
Just FYI, the Sun E10K is an old system--it was released in 1997. I wouldn't expect it to hold a candle to a recent IBM enterprise machine (I assume an IBM z9 is pretty recent).
It's pretty interesting how Sun ended up delivering the E10K to market. Especially considering how SGI fared in the end. The San Diego based team that developed the machine was originally bought by Cray, who were later bought by SGI. SGI, at the time, didn't have a place for the project and felt it competed with their own products. They sold the team to Sun for supposedly ~ $50 million who finished up the development and productized the machine.
Scott McNealy considers his company's acquisition of the Enterprise 10000 and its engineers as the best deal since Microsoft bought DOS. The acquired division was directly responsible for several billion dollars in revenue during its first year within Sun's ranks, not to mention the other revenue associated with selling service and accessories to go with all of that Enterprise 10000 hardware.
These days, Sun's top mainframe like throughput servers would be the highend E25Ks and midrange E6900s.
...what can it do that ssh and an X11 session can't?
Well, maybe if you did a little reading...
Supported Protocols Microsoft RDP X11 HTTP, HTTPS SSH Citrix Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) Telnet VT, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) TN3270E TN5250
Supported Application Types Microsoft Windows Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX (character and graphical) IBM mainframe or AS/400 HTML, Java
Client Requirements Leading Java technology-enabled clients, including Microsoft Windows, Java Desktop System, Linux, and Mac OS X Sun Secure Global Desktop Native Client-enabled devices including thin clients, wireless PDAs, and pocket PCs Server Requirements
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) v3 Microsoft Active Directory RSA SecurID Network Information Service (NIS) Microsoft Windows Domains HTTP, HTTPS including Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based client certificates
And if you're being forced to use a browser to access your server, who says that you're not on a machine with keyloggers and screen capturing?
Well I run Gentoo on my home system and I don't think I would want to run it on a production server. Maybe it's because I updated my packages too much, but I want to have the latest software with the latest securit fixes. My problem with it is that with some regularity, emerge update tends to break things. I then proceed to search the gentoo forums to find others are having the same problem and that this can be fixed by commenting out a certain line in some/etc/security/pam... file. Is my system still secure after this? Who knows. Or maybe the fix is to run some gentoo specific script as root which will update some etc files or patch a bunch of binaries. It just doesn't seem that stable to me. My point is you have to rely on the forums and be prepared to try different fixes without any explanation.
On the other hand, I love being able to play Doom III or watch movies on my Gentoo box. Thanks, Gentoo!
Slashdot Mirror
Working at Sun I've heard the higher-ups discuss these grants and awards and from what I gather, despite the award money, it is still very expensive for the company. The award money is not enough to fund a competitive entry. IBM definitely has a lot more money to put into the effort than Sun does. Not defending them though. It's a bummer for the company that they didn't get the grant, but I probably agree that losing could be a good thing. Winning would be great for bragging rights and image.
I really don't know anything.
instead of speculating? Here's Tim Bray's blog post about hiring them here and a follow up here.
from Tim's blog:
He answers more questions on his blog.
And here's the opensolaris.org tools forum/mailing-list where the revision control decision was discussed. Besides Mercurial, several other tools were considered. This was all done out in the open.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID =9
And here's an example of the ZFS team discussing the design of a new feature on the public forum.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messag eID=47936
I think IBM's comments are really meant to impose FUD. If you look into the project I think you undoubtedly will see that it is open now. As more time passes and, for example, the external contribution mechanism is streamlined with the move to Mercurial, I think it will *appear* open without question to outsiders and silly handline grabbing IBM fud-filled comments will not even make slashdot.
Just FYI, the Sun E10K is an old system--it was released in 1997. I wouldn't expect it to hold a candle to a recent IBM enterprise machine (I assume an IBM z9 is pretty recent).
It's pretty interesting how Sun ended up delivering the E10K to market. Especially considering how SGI fared in the end. The San Diego based team that developed the machine was originally bought by Cray, who were later bought by SGI. SGI, at the time, didn't have a place for the project and felt it competed with their own products. They sold the team to Sun for supposedly ~ $50 million who finished up the development and productized the machine.
Check out this site... http://www.filibeto.org/~aduritz/truetrue/e10000/h ow-e10k-wasborn.html -
These days, Sun's top mainframe like throughput servers would be the highend E25Ks and midrange E6900s.
Well, maybe if you did a little reading...
And if you're being forced to use a browser to access your server, who says that you're not on a machine with keyloggers and screen capturing?
I admit I work for Sun.
Well I run Gentoo on my home system and I don't think I would want to run it on a production server. Maybe it's because I updated my packages too much, but I want to have the latest software with the latest securit fixes. My problem with it is that with some regularity, emerge update tends to break things. I then proceed to search the gentoo forums to find others are having the same problem and that this can be fixed by commenting out a certain line in some /etc/security/pam... file. Is my system still secure after this? Who knows. Or maybe the fix is to run some gentoo specific script as root which will update some etc files or patch a bunch of binaries. It just doesn't seem that stable to me. My point is you have to rely on the forums and be prepared to try different fixes without any explanation.
On the other hand, I love being able to play Doom III or watch movies on my Gentoo box. Thanks, Gentoo!
Hey Troll, can you run 'emerge from ignorance'? Sun has over seven billion dollars in the bank and was profitable last quarter.