Yawn, Solaris is probably the most capable server OS on the planet and it contains a number of technologies that even the most passionate Linux advocate would give their eye teeth to have in Linux. dtrace, ZFS, SMF etc etc.
Sun also developed Java still the most widely used application development and deployment platform for enterprise applications. It is also the largest single platform for Mobile Phones, way ahead of Symbian, Windows Mobile etc.
They have also developed the only credible alternative to MS's cash cow Office.
Not bad for a company apparently rubbish at Software development.
Oh come on without Sun's donations to the OpenSource community Linux would be about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Sun is the largest commercial contributor to the code base which makes up a modern Linux distribution, the last stats I saw suggested that they had donated more code than the next two largest commercial supporters IBM and RedHat combined.
Hardly the actions of a company that is hell bent on destroying the OpenSource movement.
I find telling the non IT literate that the worst case scenario is a fraudster using their credit card details to buy and download kiddy porn to their home computer as a temporary staging post. This followed by arrest, incarceration and all the associated trauma of being a convicted pedophile in an all male prison.
Actually not so fanciful recent campaigns by US and EU law enforcement officers using credit card lists seized from kiddy porn sites have uncovered individuals who were inadvertently funding the purchase of illegal material with funds stolen from their credit card accounts. These individuals were subject to protracted investigation and in some cases lost their jobs/partners before being cleared.
There are a number of vendors who supply PCI/e/x/etc crypto accelerators. However these are mostly targeted at servers where the overhead of serving up numerous encrypted streams of data is much higher than on a client PC.
The Sun T1 and T2 processors in the T2000 and T5000 also have onchip crypto units 1 on the T2000 and 8 on the T5000 which accelerate OpenSSL traffic by offloading DES, AES, MD5 etc.
Linus was asked to list areas where Linux has a technology lead. He came up with portability, memory management and filesystems. Now it is possible that at some time in the dim and distant past Linux provided the best filesystems technology and the state of the art memory management but neither of these assertions are true today nor have they been true in the recent past.
As for portability, well yes Linux has been ported to a lot of platforms it is however a bit of a stretch to conclude from this that Linux is inherently more portable than Solaris or BSD.
So his three claims for technology leadership are mostly plain wrong or arguable at best.
Linus did however help introduce the concept of good enough technology probably not the technology leadership he was asked about hence the reluctance to claim it on Linux's part.
How many times does this need to be repeated. Sun bought their license outright from USL before Novell acquired the rights to SVR4.
Sun acquired some x86 device driver code from SCO before the SCO IBM case was launched in order to improve Solaris x86 platform support.
Novell are just as unlikely to sue Sun as SCO were when they thought they owned the copy write to UNIX. And it is also irrelevant what SCO and now Novell think of Sun releasing Solaris under CDDL for all we know they both may hate the idea but it makes no difference.
The Sun funding SCO to sue IBM conspiracy theory is just that a conspiracy theory, it has no factual basis to it.
Akkk. But Solaris is a superior alternative to Linux so why on earth should Sun not say so??????
As for Gnome, as Sun is the largest commercial donator of code to the Gnome project as far as I am concerned Sun can call a desktop system using it what they like. It was only a Brand in the same way that SuSE Enterprise Desktop is was called Enterprise Desktop and not SuSE Gnome Desktop.
Sun has not misrepresented Java as an open standard because it is, it even passes the final GPL test
The only involvement with SCO was Sun's purchase of x86 device driver code from them before SCO launched their case against IBM and as for Microsoft Sun successfully Sued Microsoft for over a Billion dollars and now receives payments from Microsoft in return for Sun not suing Microsoft for IP infringements.
I would suggest that you check your facts before posting. I was going to use my Mod points to mod your post down to Troll but I felt the need to respond directly instead.
How on earth did that get moded as interesting when it was plain wrong.
Sun never bankrolled SCO, they did buy a bunch of x86 device driver code from SCO before SCO launched their suit against IBM. But to suggest that this amounted to Sun bankrolling the SCO legal case is rather like accusing any purchaser of UNIXware prior to the case of doing the same thing. Patently BS
But then the whole premise of the article is BS in the first place. Of course SCO didn't have a problem with Sun releasing Solaris Source code, how could they since Sun had very publicly bought the rights to the then SVR4 code from USL before Novell got their hands on it. Or put another way SCO knew that Sun could do what they liked with the code they owned whether SCO liked it or not.
The T1 and T2 from Sun are actually some of the most likely candidates for small scale production. The reason being that they are both modular. T1 and T2 themselves are pretty large chips but because they have 8 cores it is quite possible to produce a much reduce sized processor which has fewer cores. This is being done with the S1 processor which is FPGA based and which is a based on the original T1.
And who would that be exactly. The only two names that come to mind are Sun and IBM. Now they could shake down a few MS customers but if they did they would also be suing their own customers since most large customers buy products from all three vendors.
This is a rather unlikely scenario as no large suppliers like suing their customers because it is very bad for business. This also goes a long way to explain why MS are also unlikely to sue anyone either, that is unless they chuck Windows out in favor of Linux.
Of course the safest option if you are really concerned about getting a letter from MS's lawyers is to go with Solaris/OpenSolaris Sun has a very large patent lead over Microsoft and MS is only too well aware that Sun is very happy to use it to defend their customers.
I guess you didn't read the PDF giving details on the test. The sucky off the shelf stuff they used was in fact Linksys WRT54's probably equiped with Broadcom chipsets. They probably used Linksys because you can get OpenSource firmware for the access points which allows you to turn up the power on the radios among other things.
Its a bit of a stretch to take Sun's case against Azul which seems to be about Sun claiming that ex Sun employees took Sun IP to kick start a new company and than to suggest that this implies that Sun is likely to threaten their customers with patent violation BS. Azul is a competitor to Sun, if Azul got started on the back of Sun's IP as Sun claim then there is hardly anyone out there who would support Azul.
However you post did illustrate the intellectual gymnastics that people are prepared to go thorough to paint Sun as the bad guy despite overwhelming evidence that Sun is the goose laying the golden OpenSource eggs.
I am not sure what space you think C# occupies which Java would want to occupy.
Java's Openness has always been a point of friction even within the OpenSource community itself. On one had you had the school of thought which was pushing Sun to OpenSource Java from day one for what one can only describe as ideological reasons. On the other hand you had the school of thought that said Java is open enough, its free and it is available on all the platforms we care about and the threat of forking is much more damaging than any benefit to be had from placating the ideologues.
For those in the first category Sun will always have opensourced Java too late.
Well clearly Sun thought that not forking Java would be better for them, thats obvious but then they would have been insane to have thought that forking was a good idea. But then forking Java would have been bad for almost everyone particularly Linux since in the early days of commercial Linux use Java was an enormously important component for any Linux platform, still is. I say bad for almost everyone because obviously Microsoft had loads to gain from forking Java.
You post illustrates perfectly the double standards the OpenSource community show towards Sun and other Commercial vendors and I suspect also reveals the core motivation as well.
Firstly to the double standards. Sun is constantly criticized by some members of the community for their OpenSource strategy. The fact is though that Sun has OpenSourced all of Solaris that it is able to do without infringing other parties rights. Sun has also OpenSourced huge swathes of their middle ware and uniquely has also OpenSourced some of their processors as well most notably the T1. No other commercial company can get close to this, OpenSourced AIX and Power, OpenSourced HP-UX and Itanium of course not and even the apparent OpenSource bastion RedHat has products which are not OpenSource.
So do we get a torrent of criticism of IBM, HP or RedHat from the OpenSource community no not even a whimper. So why is Sun a target, in relative terms they so far ahead of any of their competitors you would have thought that the community would be leaving them well alone.
So you then get to the real reasons for the abuse. The first of which is that the more pragmatic members of the community realize that Sun is in fact the goose laying the golden eggs, there is no point in trying the bully the other vendors but if they crack on at Sun then maybe Sun will lay another egg. The second reason is Linux advocacy and not OpenSource advocacy, Solaris is a extremely competent competitor to Linux, it is more stable runs the same apps on the same hardware and it does so mostly faster. Because of this Solaris represents the OpenSource project most likely to eclipse Linux, hence the flaming.
Actually the EU sponsored a project to try to determine where the bulk of the code in a modern Linux distribution comes from and that study concluded that Sun's contributions were roughly 2x that of the next largest contributor. Now you can argue about the method they used and its accuracy but its rather difficult to conclude that a statement that Sun is the largest donator of code given their huge lead over anyone else is incorrect.
Linus might have a point except that Sun's large scale donations of code and IP considerably pre-date the development of an OpenSource market. In other words they were making significant donations before burnishing OpenSource credentials had any relevance or point at all.
Linus seems to want to position Sun's OpenSource contributions as at best grudging, much muttering has been made in the past about the delays in releasing Solaris and Java under OpenSource Licenses. The reality is that Sun had good legal reasons for not releasing Solaris in that they didn't own all the code in Solaris and that had to be fixed. Similarly they had good reasons for not releasing Java which were because of the threat of forking Java which they have now judged to be a thing of the past.
Sun comes in for a great deal of entirely unwarranted criticism from some members of the OpenSource community. I challenge you to find any donations from any other companies including RedHat that can compare with Solaris, OpenOffice, Java, NetBeans, Elyptic Curve, Gnome, etc etc etc. In fact its probably fair to say that Sun's donation of Java dwarfs everything that say IBM or RedHat has donated to the OpenSource community.
Linux seems to have conveniently forgotten that one of the reasons why early Linux looked very like SunOS was that Sun unlike HP, IBM and Digital had gone out of their way to publish specifications for SunOS that made it a very good source of reference for anyone wanting to build a UNIX like OS.
Linus's posts clearly illustrate that he has no idea who his real friends and real enemies are otherwise he would not have bit the hand that has fed him all these years. Jonathan's response was very measured and I am surprised that it didn't show any hint of the exasperation he had every right to express.
The more I read Linus's article the more out of touch it seems. Sun has donated more lines to of code to the OpenSource community than any other entity. If you add Sun's code donations to their insistence on standard interfaces, published specs and their willingness to share ideas when without exception the rest of the commercial SW industry thought the opposite and you come to the inevitable conclusion that Sun is probably the company most responsible for Linux being possible at all.
Linus goes on to make off the mark comments about SPARC, actually the T1 is a very interesting processor the T2 looks even more interesting, the current high end servers are quite competitive with Power and Itanium and Rock may well be a killer CPU. So much for SPARC's poor performance.
ZFS despite Linus's complaints is available for platforms other than Solaris, FreeBSD and OS-X for example as is dtrace. Despite Linus's comments about drivers the sad reality is that most Linux server administrators could survive without the plethora of device drivers available and would be quite happy with the ones available for OpenSolaris but they would kill for Dtrace, ZFS, SMF and a large raft of OpenSolaris features.
If Linus thinks that the single most important differentiator between Linux and Solaris is device drivers then god help Linux.
D-
Your post implies that Sun's lack of contribution to the Linux kernel somehow diminishes their OpenSource credentials. The reality is that Sun actually donated a large amount of IP which while not source code has made a major contribution to the Linux kernel from PAM to XFN and basic constructs like the slab memory allocator.
It also ignores the fact that what people know as Linux is in fact a kernel with bunch of OpenSource user land components some of which have a history which predates Linux and which Sun as an entity donated more code to than any other company or organization. Most of this donated code was donated under GPL.
Of course there are big differences between Linux and 1970's UNIX and thats mainly because Linux development started in 1991 and Linux is now a pretty good implementation of a 1990's UNIX operating system (tweeked SunOS). Unfortunatly UNIX has changed quite a lot since the 1990's and Linux is not a particularly good imitator of a 21st Century UNIX OS like Solaris.
Of course in reality Linux development started when GNU started because without GNU Linux would never have existed in the first place.
Interesting because Sun Studio 12 is free and the Intel compiler suite are on a time limited evaluation. You only pay for Sun Studio if you want commercial support for the product.
Sun Studio Supports x86-64 and SPARC with Linux and Solaris but does not support Windows so you would need to look for something else if you were in the market for a Suite that did provide Windows support
We have owned the same Dyson cleaner for the last 8 years. In that time it has never gone wrong though it did take some damage when it was dropped onto a tiled floor.
And that showed up one of the big advantages of Dysons, a couple of component parts cracked in the fall they were easy to remove and replacement parts were easy to source. I even found a web site which offered step by step guides on how to replace more complex parts of the cleaner had they failed.
The SCO transaction was highly unlikely to have figured at all on McNealy's departure from Sun. Why would it, conspiracy theorists will no doubt believe that Sun handed 20 million to SCO to fund their case with IBM however the reality is that Sun wanted x86 device driver code for Solaris x86 which was never part of their original license with AT&T.
SCO had the code, Sun bought it.
Now SCO may well have used the Sun money to fund their case but trying to pin the blame for that on Sun is rather like accusing every one who has in the past paid for a UNIXware license of funding SCO's assault on Linux.
Sadly your points serve to illuminate a common but always wrong view of Sun in the OSS community. Sun has always pushed OSS, they have always been the largest commercial donor to the OSS community even when IBM appeared to be making all the running. In fact many people think that OSS is the success it is largely because of Sun. Their insistence in using public standards, published interfaces and their willingness to provide easy access to source code pre-dates OSS and it has been argued provided the necessary foundations for Linux, etc to flourish. Remember Sun was doing this when IBM was pushing SNA and VM and HP was pushing MPE.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn, Solaris is probably the most capable server OS on the planet and it contains a number of technologies that even the most passionate Linux advocate would give their eye teeth to have in Linux. dtrace, ZFS, SMF etc etc.
Sun also developed Java still the most widely used application development and deployment platform for enterprise applications. It is also the largest single platform for Mobile Phones, way ahead of Symbian, Windows Mobile etc.
They have also developed the only credible alternative to MS's cash cow Office.
Not bad for a company apparently rubbish at Software development.
Oh come on without Sun's donations to the OpenSource community Linux would be about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Sun is the largest commercial contributor to the code base which makes up a modern Linux distribution, the last stats I saw suggested that they had donated more code than the next two largest commercial supporters IBM and RedHat combined.
Hardly the actions of a company that is hell bent on destroying the OpenSource movement.
I find telling the non IT literate that the worst case scenario is a fraudster using their credit card details to buy and download kiddy porn to their home computer as a temporary staging post. This followed by arrest, incarceration and all the associated trauma of being a convicted pedophile in an all male prison.
Actually not so fanciful recent campaigns by US and EU law enforcement officers using credit card lists seized from kiddy porn sites have uncovered individuals who were inadvertently funding the purchase of illegal material with funds stolen from their credit card accounts. These individuals were subject to protracted investigation and in some cases lost their jobs/partners before being cleared.
There are a number of vendors who supply PCI/e/x/etc crypto accelerators. However these are mostly targeted at servers where the overhead of serving up numerous encrypted streams of data is much higher than on a client PC.
The Sun T1 and T2 processors in the T2000 and T5000 also have onchip crypto units 1 on the T2000 and 8 on the T5000 which accelerate OpenSSL traffic by offloading DES, AES, MD5 etc.
Linus was asked to list areas where Linux has a technology lead. He came up with portability, memory management and filesystems. Now it is possible that at some time in the dim and distant past Linux provided the best filesystems technology and the state of the art memory management but neither of these assertions are true today nor have they been true in the recent past.
As for portability, well yes Linux has been ported to a lot of platforms it is however a bit of a stretch to conclude from this that Linux is inherently more portable than Solaris or BSD.
So his three claims for technology leadership are mostly plain wrong or arguable at best.
Linus did however help introduce the concept of good enough technology probably not the technology leadership he was asked about hence the reluctance to claim it on Linux's part.
Sun actually purchased the rights in 1991.
How many times does this need to be repeated. Sun bought their license outright from USL before Novell acquired the rights to SVR4.
Sun acquired some x86 device driver code from SCO before the SCO IBM case was launched in order to improve Solaris x86 platform support.
Novell are just as unlikely to sue Sun as SCO were when they thought they owned the copy write to UNIX. And it is also irrelevant what SCO and now Novell think of Sun releasing Solaris under CDDL for all we know they both may hate the idea but it makes no difference.
The Sun funding SCO to sue IBM conspiracy theory is just that a conspiracy theory, it has no factual basis to it.
Akkk. But Solaris is a superior alternative to Linux so why on earth should Sun not say so??????
As for Gnome, as Sun is the largest commercial donator of code to the Gnome project as far as I am concerned Sun can call a desktop system using it what they like. It was only a Brand in the same way that SuSE Enterprise Desktop is was called Enterprise Desktop and not SuSE Gnome Desktop.
Sun has not misrepresented Java as an open standard because it is, it even passes the final GPL test
The only involvement with SCO was Sun's purchase of x86 device driver code from them before SCO launched their case against IBM and as for Microsoft Sun successfully Sued Microsoft for over a Billion dollars and now receives payments from Microsoft in return for Sun not suing Microsoft for IP infringements.
I would suggest that you check your facts before posting. I was going to use my Mod points to mod your post down to Troll but I felt the need to respond directly instead.
How on earth did that get moded as interesting when it was plain wrong.
Sun never bankrolled SCO, they did buy a bunch of x86 device driver code from SCO before SCO launched their suit against IBM. But to suggest that this amounted to Sun bankrolling the SCO legal case is rather like accusing any purchaser of UNIXware prior to the case of doing the same thing. Patently BS
But then the whole premise of the article is BS in the first place. Of course SCO didn't have a problem with Sun releasing Solaris Source code, how could they since Sun had very publicly bought the rights to the then SVR4 code from USL before Novell got their hands on it. Or put another way SCO knew that Sun could do what they liked with the code they owned whether SCO liked it or not.
The T1 and T2 from Sun are actually some of the most likely candidates for small scale production. The reason being that they are both modular. T1 and T2 themselves are pretty large chips but because they have 8 cores it is quite possible to produce a much reduce sized processor which has fewer cores. This is being done with the S1 processor which is FPGA based and which is a based on the original T1.
Solaris Containers are Free
And who would that be exactly. The only two names that come to mind are Sun and IBM. Now they could shake down a few MS customers but if they did they would also be suing their own customers since most large customers buy products from all three vendors.
This is a rather unlikely scenario as no large suppliers like suing their customers because it is very bad for business. This also goes a long way to explain why MS are also unlikely to sue anyone either, that is unless they chuck Windows out in favor of Linux.
Of course the safest option if you are really concerned about getting a letter from MS's lawyers is to go with Solaris/OpenSolaris Sun has a very large patent lead over Microsoft and MS is only too well aware that Sun is very happy to use it to defend their customers.
I guess you didn't read the PDF giving details on the test. The sucky off the shelf stuff they used was in fact Linksys WRT54's probably equiped with Broadcom chipsets. They probably used Linksys because you can get OpenSource firmware for the access points which allows you to turn up the power on the radios among other things.
Its a bit of a stretch to take Sun's case against Azul which seems to be about Sun claiming that ex Sun employees took Sun IP to kick start a new company and than to suggest that this implies that Sun is likely to threaten their customers with patent violation BS. Azul is a competitor to Sun, if Azul got started on the back of Sun's IP as Sun claim then there is hardly anyone out there who would support Azul.
However you post did illustrate the intellectual gymnastics that people are prepared to go thorough to paint Sun as the bad guy despite overwhelming evidence that Sun is the goose laying the golden OpenSource eggs.
I am not sure what space you think C# occupies which Java would want to occupy.
Java's Openness has always been a point of friction even within the OpenSource community itself. On one had you had the school of thought which was pushing Sun to OpenSource Java from day one for what one can only describe as ideological reasons. On the other hand you had the school of thought that said Java is open enough, its free and it is available on all the platforms we care about and the threat of forking is much more damaging than any benefit to be had from placating the ideologues. For those in the first category Sun will always have opensourced Java too late.
Well clearly Sun thought that not forking Java would be better for them, thats obvious but then they would have been insane to have thought that forking was a good idea. But then forking Java would have been bad for almost everyone particularly Linux since in the early days of commercial Linux use Java was an enormously important component for any Linux platform, still is. I say bad for almost everyone because obviously Microsoft had loads to gain from forking Java.
You post illustrates perfectly the double standards the OpenSource community show towards Sun and other Commercial vendors and I suspect also reveals the core motivation as well.
Firstly to the double standards. Sun is constantly criticized by some members of the community for their OpenSource strategy. The fact is though that Sun has OpenSourced all of Solaris that it is able to do without infringing other parties rights. Sun has also OpenSourced huge swathes of their middle ware and uniquely has also OpenSourced some of their processors as well most notably the T1. No other commercial company can get close to this, OpenSourced AIX and Power, OpenSourced HP-UX and Itanium of course not and even the apparent OpenSource bastion RedHat has products which are not OpenSource.
So do we get a torrent of criticism of IBM, HP or RedHat from the OpenSource community no not even a whimper. So why is Sun a target, in relative terms they so far ahead of any of their competitors you would have thought that the community would be leaving them well alone.
So you then get to the real reasons for the abuse. The first of which is that the more pragmatic members of the community realize that Sun is in fact the goose laying the golden eggs, there is no point in trying the bully the other vendors but if they crack on at Sun then maybe Sun will lay another egg. The second reason is Linux advocacy and not OpenSource advocacy, Solaris is a extremely competent competitor to Linux, it is more stable runs the same apps on the same hardware and it does so mostly faster. Because of this Solaris represents the OpenSource project most likely to eclipse Linux, hence the flaming.
Actually the EU sponsored a project to try to determine where the bulk of the code in a modern Linux distribution comes from and that study concluded that Sun's contributions were roughly 2x that of the next largest contributor. Now you can argue about the method they used and its accuracy but its rather difficult to conclude that a statement that Sun is the largest donator of code given their huge lead over anyone else is incorrect.
Linus might have a point except that Sun's large scale donations of code and IP considerably pre-date the development of an OpenSource market. In other words they were making significant donations before burnishing OpenSource credentials had any relevance or point at all.
Linus seems to want to position Sun's OpenSource contributions as at best grudging, much muttering has been made in the past about the delays in releasing Solaris and Java under OpenSource Licenses. The reality is that Sun had good legal reasons for not releasing Solaris in that they didn't own all the code in Solaris and that had to be fixed. Similarly they had good reasons for not releasing Java which were because of the threat of forking Java which they have now judged to be a thing of the past.
Sun comes in for a great deal of entirely unwarranted criticism from some members of the OpenSource community. I challenge you to find any donations from any other companies including RedHat that can compare with Solaris, OpenOffice, Java, NetBeans, Elyptic Curve, Gnome, etc etc etc. In fact its probably fair to say that Sun's donation of Java dwarfs everything that say IBM or RedHat has donated to the OpenSource community.
Linux seems to have conveniently forgotten that one of the reasons why early Linux looked very like SunOS was that Sun unlike HP, IBM and Digital had gone out of their way to publish specifications for SunOS that made it a very good source of reference for anyone wanting to build a UNIX like OS.
Linus's posts clearly illustrate that he has no idea who his real friends and real enemies are otherwise he would not have bit the hand that has fed him all these years. Jonathan's response was very measured and I am surprised that it didn't show any hint of the exasperation he had every right to express.
The more I read Linus's article the more out of touch it seems. Sun has donated more lines to of code to the OpenSource community than any other entity. If you add Sun's code donations to their insistence on standard interfaces, published specs and their willingness to share ideas when without exception the rest of the commercial SW industry thought the opposite and you come to the inevitable conclusion that Sun is probably the company most responsible for Linux being possible at all.
Linus goes on to make off the mark comments about SPARC, actually the T1 is a very interesting processor the T2 looks even more interesting, the current high end servers are quite competitive with Power and Itanium and Rock may well be a killer CPU. So much for SPARC's poor performance.
ZFS despite Linus's complaints is available for platforms other than Solaris, FreeBSD and OS-X for example as is dtrace. Despite Linus's comments about drivers the sad reality is that most Linux server administrators could survive without the plethora of device drivers available and would be quite happy with the ones available for OpenSolaris but they would kill for Dtrace, ZFS, SMF and a large raft of OpenSolaris features.
If Linus thinks that the single most important differentiator between Linux and Solaris is device drivers then god help Linux.
D-
Your post implies that Sun's lack of contribution to the Linux kernel somehow diminishes their OpenSource credentials. The reality is that Sun actually donated a large amount of IP which while not source code has made a major contribution to the Linux kernel from PAM to XFN and basic constructs like the slab memory allocator.
It also ignores the fact that what people know as Linux is in fact a kernel with bunch of OpenSource user land components some of which have a history which predates Linux and which Sun as an entity donated more code to than any other company or organization. Most of this donated code was donated under GPL.
Of course there are big differences between Linux and 1970's UNIX and thats mainly because Linux development started in 1991 and Linux is now a pretty good implementation of a 1990's UNIX operating system (tweeked SunOS). Unfortunatly UNIX has changed quite a lot since the 1990's and Linux is not a particularly good imitator of a 21st Century UNIX OS like Solaris.
Of course in reality Linux development started when GNU started because without GNU Linux would never have existed in the first place.
Interesting because Sun Studio 12 is free and the Intel compiler suite are on a time limited evaluation. You only pay for Sun Studio if you want commercial support for the product.
Sun Studio Supports x86-64 and SPARC with Linux and Solaris but does not support Windows so you would need to look for something else if you were in the market for a Suite that did provide Windows support
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
This gives an interesting insight into Sun's thinking on Microsoft's threats.
We have owned the same Dyson cleaner for the last 8 years. In that time it has never gone wrong though it did take some damage when it was dropped onto a tiled floor.
And that showed up one of the big advantages of Dysons, a couple of component parts cracked in the fall they were easy to remove and replacement parts were easy to source. I even found a web site which offered step by step guides on how to replace more complex parts of the cleaner had they failed.
The SCO transaction was highly unlikely to have figured at all on McNealy's departure from Sun. Why would it, conspiracy theorists will no doubt believe that Sun handed 20 million to SCO to fund their case with IBM however the reality is that Sun wanted x86 device driver code for Solaris x86 which was never part of their original license with AT&T.
SCO had the code, Sun bought it.
Now SCO may well have used the Sun money to fund their case but trying to pin the blame for that on Sun is rather like accusing every one who has in the past paid for a UNIXware license of funding SCO's assault on Linux.
Sadly your points serve to illuminate a common but always wrong view of Sun in the OSS community. Sun has always pushed OSS, they have always been the largest commercial donor to the OSS community even when IBM appeared to be making all the running. In fact many people think that OSS is the success it is largely because of Sun. Their insistence in using public standards, published interfaces and their willingness to provide easy access to source code pre-dates OSS and it has been argued provided the necessary foundations for Linux, etc to flourish. Remember Sun was doing this when IBM was pushing SNA and VM and HP was pushing MPE.