Um. The whole point of blades is that they don't have the expensive interconnect
It depends, some blade servers do have rather expensive interconnects eGenera for example and all blades are more expensive than buying the same resource in a 1U/2U server.
The first Niagara server from Sun is not going to be a large system, think 1U or 2U and clearly in that sort of form factor with a price thats competitive with current 1U/2U servers it will be competitive.
You then factor in Solaris 10, Zones/Containers and you have a very effective competitor to x86 blade servers running a blade provisioning product since provisioning a Zone/Container is very simple and very quick process.
SGI's running embarassingly parallel applications scale to very large numbers of CPU's but then almost anything else does as well.
SGI's running commercial workloads scale embarassingly badly, on the only commercial workload test SGI have published SGI managed to get 13x the throughput (and scaling had stopped) with a 28 way SGI Altix 3000 running Linux, BTW thats terrible.
Actually its not even clear that IBM donated any value at all revocation clauses not withstanding.
Closer scrutiny of the "500" patents "donated" by IBM reveal that some of them don't relate to software in any form and that all of them are due to require renewal.
Hard to say if this is a zero value donation or less than that. However it did have value from IBM's perspective since it quite clearly fooled the credulous.
Sun's leadership developed a license that is almost GPL-like, yet they purposely went out of their way in making it incompatible with the GPL. This is a clear sign of contempt for the GPL. It may be too late for them to switch their other products over to this license, they'd lose all credibility, but if they could they would. They still aren't able to articulate a defense for their action, only that they don't see the big deal. This from a company that uses the GPL in other open source products. Most open source advocates haven't missed the message on this one.
And what would be the benefit of Solaris being released under GPL ?
Sure it would add to the number of lines of code available under GPL but would this be a benefit ? Not really
Could it be usefull to be able to incorporate code from the Solaris kernel in kernels such as Linux released under GPL ? Well possibly but the possible advantages are heavily outweighed by the practical dissadvantages.
Take dtrace, wonderfull technology but in order to impliment it in Linux you need to put probe points in the whole of the Linux kernel and the libraries, this is not a cut and paste excercise and to be honest the dprobes team would have done it already if Linus had thought it was useful which sadly he didn't.
How about Solaris scalability, its much better than Linux so simplistically you could imagine incorporating the components that make Solaris scale into Linux except that again you would end up having to re-engineer the whole of the Linux kernel and many of the libs.
How about the rather limited things that Linux does better than Solaris 10, single threaded performance being the only example I can think of, well again this touches so many parts of the system that its unlikely to be of benefit.
So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.
Don't confuse market tactics against a dangerous monopolistic rival (MS Office, Visual Studio) to be approval or acceptance of a license. Sun is fully aware which license is more effective (BSD or GPL) against M$, and have used it strategically. But, Sun's leadership is not how you make them out to be. They are the opposite. They could have easily made their license compatible with the GPL rather than exclude it, but they didn't.
The problem with your point is that it conveniently ignores two killer facts.
1. Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.
2. Sun's was founded on the belief that Open Standards and the pre-cursor to Open Source was the way to develop systems, Bill Joy when asked always said that the majority of the smart people in the world didn't work for you and so the trick was to harness their energies as well as Sun's hence the OpenSource, Open Standards approach. Most people would now call this enlightened self interest.
Yes! You took the words right out of my brain. The FSF is useful; they code. OSI is nothing but talk. Why would we let them represent us? Then with near lethal levels of unintentional irony ESR tells stallman to shut up and show him the code.
Hang on if this view was to prevail then "OpenSource " advocates would have to stop flaming Sun over Java and recognise that it has in fact been enormously usefull and a wonderfull donation. Since this is an impossible position for any true advocate to assume your view is bound to fail despite its obvious merit.
Sun started the abuse. Abrasive is when you rub your beard stubble; Sun's top executives' open hostility and condescension towards the GPL and Linux has been well documented for years in various news outlets. A backlash from the community isn't only expected, but understandable.
Rubbish, Sun has never been anti GPL how could they be they are the largest commercial donator of code under GPL. We have discussed OpenOffice in detail but Sun has also made huge donations to NetBeans, Grid Engine and a whole host of other GPL or GPL compatible projects. Any "backlash" from the community has been ill informed and hugely counter productive.
The reality is that certain elements of the OpenSource community have forgotten that Sun is the company that is most responsible for creating an environment where OpenSource can be viable. Sun has been comprehensively flamed over the way it has released Java but Java is freely available on OpenSource platforms and at the same time has progressed much more sucessfully than the OpenSource naysayers predicted.
Critics of Sun's stance on Java accuse Sun of arrogance, Sun quite rightly point to their Java track record and quite rightly ask their critics to explain how releasing Java under GPL would have improved the outcome.
Personally, I don't think companies should be praised or denegrated for doing business any more than a lion should be for killing or not killing it's next meal. Sun and IBM are companies. A company must make money at all costs. If killing the GPL and Linux would make IBM and Sun money, they'd do their best to do it (see M$).
Sun and IBM are very different companies and have very different track records. Long before the fashionable adoption of Linux and OpenSource Sun had a track record of supporting Open Standards and GPL in a climate where industry analysts considered this to be a major commercial mistake.
At the time IBM would not have been seen dead supporting Open Standards or making major donations to GPL because it did not make business sense to IBM.
Now Linux and OpenSource are fashionable and represents a real business opportunity and guess what IBM is trying to present itself as the OpenSource Linux company, don't mistake this for commitment this is simply business in a way that Sun's continued support for Open Standards and OpenSource is not.
The total number of people worldwide who would even know what that sentence means, much less be interested in doing it themselves, is so small as to round down to zero.
Of course but then the same applies to Linux, Java and almost every other technology discussed on slashdot. The % of people worldwide who understand the above vs the available population will always round down to 0.
Sadly this truism doesn't actually help your point does it.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format
So?
LOL. Just making up statistics isn't going to get you anywhere.
Gartner, IDC and Bloor research have all concluded that Openoffice/StarOffice currently occupies 2and place in the Office Suite market behind MS-Office they all also conclude that OO/SO is the most complete competitior to MS-Office.
No, they're not. Let me repeat that, just to make sure you get it: No, they are not. They're "cool" only to the extent that they serve a purpose. That purpose can be one of two things: interoperability or transparency. Because nobody reads the Open Office file formats, interoperability is a non issue. (And nobody reads them because nobody writes them; Open Office is the nichest of the niche players.) And because nobody is archiving Open Office files, transparency doesn't count, either.
Sorry but the facts are rather different from your assertions.
I have worked with users who are doing exactly what you claim people arn't doing e.g working directly with OpenOffice XML files.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format
Finally OpenOffice is hardly an also ran in the Office space it is the second most used product behind MS-Office and in its StarOffice guise the most sucessfull commercially.
You are welcome to you opinions but please don't try passing them off as facts
Its good to see that Linux 2.6 kicked Solaris's ass.
So you think that Linux 2.6 being ~5% faster than a beta version of Solaris 10 is evidence that Linux 2.6 kicked Solaris's ass ??
Interesting, the reality is more like a wakeup call for Linux advocates. Single CPU performance is hardly Solaris's sweet spot up to now but Sun seem to have managed to deliver rather good single CPU performance which coupled with Solaris's undoubted scalability will make a rather daunting combination when compared with Linux.
That's a very good point. OpenOffice is great and all, but what if they have lots of macros written for the Office suite? Once OpenOffice has implemented compatibility with macros, there will be no reason to not switch. The other thing that occurred to me, is why do they feel like they have to upgrade? Why can't they stick with the version they have?
There are allready companies that will convert your MS-Office macros to StarOffice/OpenOffice macros as a one-time conversion.
This isn't always the answer because some of the MS-Macros use plugins that cannot be converted.
However a lot of the MS-Macros are unneccesary in OpenOffice/StarOffice this is because they are primarely aimed at taking data from some external source and stuffing it into a MS-Office formated file, typically word or excel. This is not really necessary in OO/SO because their XML file format allows you to do this directly without requiring macros.
As for versions, generally its support that drives upgrades these days in the windows space.
Ive always kinda thought of Solaris as a 4 wheel drive truck in low range, but it looks like they added a turbo:) I wonder if its a result of better x86 optimization or the new Filesystem
The test was done with standard Solaris UFS+ apparently they used forcedirectio. UFS+ on Solaris 10 is pretty much the same as UFS+ on Solaris 9.
I hope they re-run the tests on Solaris 10 when ZFS ships in the next release which is due mid year.
I was suprised by how close Solaris 10 was to Linux, after all they used a beta OS on a very tiny system, hardly Solaris's sweet spot in the past.
But Open Office is a big ol' steaming pile of crap. It's 1990s stuff. Why hasn't that horse been taking out back and put down yet?
As long as Linux programmers are trying to catch up to 1997, the platform is doomed.
When did you last use OpenOffice ??
Obviously not recently, native XML files are enormously cool and something that every other office suite has had to play catchup with.
Oh, so you're just hanging this all on StarOffice: a product which for the majority of it's actual life was nurtured by Star Division and not Sun. Swooping down and buying something with ill gotten dot-bomb cash is unimpressive when considering that it was StarDivision that for years had the gumption to attempt to compete directly with Microsoft on their own turf.
You clearly never used the pre Sun StarOffice product, if you had as I did you would realise that your point doesn't really stand much close scrutiny. They are dramatically different products, Sun has sunk large amounts of cash into StarOffice/OpenOffice since buying StarDivision and in a climate that hardly compares with the heights of the dot com boom.
In addition Sun's donations to OpenSource hardly start and finish with OpenOffice as I said earlier last time anyone counted more of Red Hat had been donated by Sun than any other commercial entity including Red Hat.
And of course you then get to Java, now many OpenSource pedants will claim that Sun's license for Java isn't open but frankly this is an argument that is rather like the Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of Christianity claiming that they suscribe to totally different religions.
Fact is Java has developed rather well, despite claims to the contrary there is a lot of 3rd party involvement in the process and Java is widely and freely available.
In the process Sun has avoided the pitfalls of forking Java and at the same time provided the Linux community with the single most usefull tool to allow Linux to penetrate into the commercial server space.
As an aside despite having access to a detailed specification for Java with no need to reverse engineer the platform there is currently no OpenSource Java implimentation that could be described as remotely complete.
And your point about competing with Microsoft on their own turf is hugely ammusing, hands up which major systems vendor is competing with Microsoft on their onw turf with a Linux based desktop ???
Yup it is only Sun who has the gumption to do this. IBM are happy to consult on the feasbility of doing this but products !!!! Ohh no
The problem with Sun is that they can't decide whether or not they want to help us or to FUD us to death. This is why they get less respect than IBM
FUD who exactly, if you are a Red Hat advocate then yes consider yourself FUDDED but don't try to wrap yourself in a Linux flag followed by an OpenSource flag to try to claim that Sun has been FUDDING OpenSource. Sun has absolutely no interest in assaulting OpenSource and only marginal Red Hat related interest in FUDDING Linux.
Apathy is far better than slander
Odd Sun is the single vendor most responsible for creating the enviroment that allows Linux to exist and the largest commercial donator to the OpenSource community but you end up prefering style over substance. Give me substance over style anyday.
Don't know but it would be very bad news if they did.
I recently discussed the OpenOffice.org program with Bruce Perens, he isn't impressed with Sun's attempts to create a large community of external developers for OpenOffice.
Afterwards it did occur to me that Bruces concerns might well be driven by the worry that if Sun takes too much flak from the OpenSource community then their exit from things like OpenOffice would shoot the program in the head.
I doubt that this would happen but perhaps the reason why Sun gets so much flak is because the OpenSource community is almost uniquely dependant on Sun's good will.
NFS, PAM, XFN, etc that you list... the standard was set by Sun as an open standard, but the open source versions of them were reinvented on the outside, not donated by Sun.
Wrong Sun has released the NFS source code and they also funded the University of Michigan to do a Linux port.
And last time anyone actually counted Sun had more code attributed to it in the Red Hat distribution than any other commercial company including Red Hat.
OpenOffice is definitely a huge chunk of GPL code, but they also didn't develop that. They purchased a dying company and opensourced the company's product. It was a cheap move aimed at poking holes in Microsoft's officeware dominance.
Hardly cheap Sun paid 59.5 million dollars for StarDivision and still employs most of their staff who now work on the OpenOffice program.
Its also hardly dying
How about the cheap move of releasing 500 patents that are all due to expire and calling that a great donation. Did you applaud IBM's donation ???
I know full well about Sun's positions on the matter. I've raised the merits of Open Source repeatedly to my Sun sales and technical representatives, who generally frown at me and hand me Sun company dogma about how they're going to crush linux into the ground, and that open source is just a phase.
You think you do and thats obviously part of the problem. Don't worry though you have plenty of company.
You seem to disregard the fact that 1600 patents that you can't use due to strings attached are actually harmful (you need to avoid them, Sun explicitly said the license is GPL-incompatible on purpose) while 500 patents that you don't need to use are harmless. Besides, let's see how Sun clarifies the "we don't know yet whether we want to retain the rights to sue our developers for patent infringement over these" stance.
Hardly, I don't care if my kernel is developed under CDDL or GPL so assuming its CDDL then the patents are very usefull.
And on the flip side how do you know that any of the 500 patents IBM have "gifted" actually protect you from anything ?
The Sun donation is actually rather safer than the IBM one, that is unless you are interested in screw closures in which case there isn't anything Sun can do to help you.
IBM: Here are 500 patents and their terms
SUN: Day 1: There will be something, maybe Patents
SUN: Day 2: 1500 Patents!
SUN: Day 3: For Open Source
SUN: Day 4: Only Our Open Source
SUN: Day 5: We are still thinking of terms.
SUN: Day 6: Real Soon Now
Day 7: IBM sorry we forgot to tell you but those 500 patents we gave you they were all expiring.
Day 8: IBM and some of them arn't applicable to software (but 500 is a nice round number).
Day 9: IBM but they are compatible with GPL.
So who is the idiot ??????
You're counting contributions by sun employees semi-officially and/or on their own time. Sun as a corporate entity isn't as giving to the GPL as you have portrayed them.
Really, so you have never heard of OpenOffice just the largest single donation of source under GPL (made by Sun) and Sun still continues to be by far in away the largest contributor with something like 100 full time staff.
Heard of gnome Sun is heavily involved in Gnome.
They have made big donations to Apache, Mozilla and a whole range of other OpenSource projects.
Where do you think the NFS source code came from, PAM, XFN ext the list is pretty endless.
Perhaps Sun's problem is that they have given too much and given it in too wide a swathe of areas. Perhaps Sun should have concentrated on one narrow area like say donating a filesystem to run alongside all the other available filesystems with pretty much identical capabilites. Now who was that ??
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Sun's founders most notably Bill Joy come from a precursor of OpenSource so you could say that it is ingrained in Sun's culture. But more important than that is Sun's core belief that industry should innovate around open standards. Few companies now would publically disagree with this stance but when Sun started expousing this doctrine it was universally ridiculed by the same companies HP, IBM etc that the OpenSource (really Linux) community hold up to Sun as exemplars of how to support OpenSource. All this does is make the Linux advocates propounding these propositions look ridiculous and ungratefull to Sun and for that matter to anyone with any grasp of computing history.
Royally? Is it all at the forbearance of Scott McNeally, or is Scott McNeally at the forbearance of the skills, initiative and connections of people who work for Sun?
I don't know the answer to that you would need to talk to someone who works for Sun. However Scott and Johnathan sign the checks and the fact that they keep signing the checks to support a huge range of OpenSource projects from OpenOffice to Apache tends to suggest that it is Scott and Johnathan who are being forebearing.
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Sun responds when its pushed and does so with vigour, the OpenSource (linux) community pushes a lot and gets back rather less than it deserves.
For some strange reason the OpenSource (linux) community is much more receptive to blandishments from IBM. As an example the current ludicrous discussion about the merits of IBM's 500 expiring some non SW patent "donation" to OpenSource vs Sun's donation of 1600 current patents but under a license that not everyone likes. IBM's donation would appear to be largely useless but has no strings attached, Sun's appears to be very usefull but has strings as usual the community has become obsessed with the strings.
In my opinion if the OpenSource community wants to have a better relationship with by far its largest commercial backer then its largely up to the OpenSource community. Less whinging, less focus on style and more focus on substance would go a long way.
IMHO It's a bit stupid if Sun looks into getting their hands on an existing database in order to open-source it afterwards.
Its a good thing that they ignored your advice or similar when Sun bought StarDivision otherwise OpenOffice would not exist now would it
Sun did buy a DBMS sometime ago when they bought Clustra which is currently used as part of their J2EE app server.
It's going to be released under CDDL if anything. This in itself denies its use by most of the open source world. *sigh* why does Sun have to keep on trying to destroy Linux and the GPL?
Sigh, Sun is the largest single commercial donator of source under GPL dwarfing IBM, SGI, HP and all the other commercial entities involved in GPL by a wide margin.
Just for laughs and to illustrate how risable your point is at the last count more of the Red Hat distribution had been donated by Sun than any other commercial entiry including Red Hat.
The more I read OpenSource (really Linux) advocates flaming Sun for some imagined misdemeanor or other the more I tend to conclude that Sun has been remarkably forbearing with the community as a whole and that if Sun have been a bit rude on occasions they have been rather less rude then the community right royally deserves.
Lets face it if you were to single out one major commercial player who has almost single handed made it possible for Linux ot exist its actually not IBM, SGI, HP but Sun. They were largely responsible for the creation of the commercial UNIX market, they were almost exclusively responsible for insisting on published standards, API's etc and they have made huge donations to the basic plumbing of Linux.
Sadly these hugely worthy but clearly boring activities are nothing compared to the IBM/HP/SGI eye candy which has little to do with fostering open standards and OpenSource and everything to do with moving tin, SW and services.
Sure they are abrasive but lets face it in the face of the abuse they have received I would be pissed as hell as well, talk about biting the hand that feeds.
Actually it wasn't there is also a patent exchange agreement which would allow MS to pay royalties to Sun if there is a significant inbalance between the two companies patent portfolio (which there is at the moment).
IBM's gift is clearly better; even if IBM's patents weren't worth anything, at least they do no harm to FOSS.
Since it is now apparent that the 500 IBM patents you refer to were due to expire and that some of them don't even relate to software your point is highly questionable. Imagine developing code under GPL using IP derived from one of the "gifted" patents only to discover that you arn't in fact protected at all.
Yup, Sun is trying to pull another fast one, like they did with Java. Fortunately, this time, we're smarter (and Java is on its way out, too).
I have always "admired" the OpenSource communitys propensity to savage the people who in reality are providing them with the greatest assistance.
You may not like the Java licence but it is available on Linux, its developing and its also the mainstay of commercial Linux deployments. Does the Linux version lag Solaris or Windows and lack functionality ?? Is Sun the only company making money out of Java ??
And the sad reality which is unfolding is that it isn't Sun who has pulled a fast one but IBM unless you think that releasing a patent for a screw closure under the banner of a SW patent release is straight dealing.
How about barraging IBM with requests to OpenSource AIX or their crown jewels DB2 ???
All you have demonstrated in this post is the usual OpenSource concentration on style over substance. Sun is actually the largest single commercial donator of code under GPL let alone their other licenses. Sun however also has perfectly justified pops at Red Hat which earns them bad style points with some OpenSource advocates
IBM is going to drop the J-Bomb next week, an open-sourced Java SDK, at which point a whole lot of people are going to say, "Huh? Sun who?". I've got a dollar bet that that SDK is going on the ISO track which makes a whole other group of people happy.
Well instead of Sun who, how about IBM what. Which I guess boils down to the current strange propensity of the OpenSource commnunity to look very hard at a Sun gift horse but let the IBM gift horse prance by without any scrutiny at all.
I say this because it now turns out that the 500 patents IBM have "donated" to the OpenSource community are all due to expire and some of them aint even for software. One refers to a screw closure while another refers to a medical early warning system.
Still they are all compatible with GPL so why let small details like their usefullness get in the way of a perfectly fine Sun bashing session.
This would be hugely funny if it wasn't for the fact that its yet another example of the OpenSource community savaging their friends while cosying up to the people who have absolutely no interest in their survival.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. The whole point of blades is that they don't have the expensive interconnect
It depends, some blade servers do have rather expensive interconnects eGenera for example and all blades are more expensive than buying the same resource in a 1U/2U server.
The first Niagara server from Sun is not going to be a large system, think 1U or 2U and clearly in that sort of form factor with a price thats competitive with current 1U/2U servers it will be competitive.
You then factor in Solaris 10, Zones/Containers and you have a very effective competitor to x86 blade servers running a blade provisioning product since provisioning a Zone/Container is very simple and very quick process.
Not really.
SGI's running embarassingly parallel applications scale to very large numbers of CPU's but then almost anything else does as well.
SGI's running commercial workloads scale embarassingly badly, on the only commercial workload test SGI have published SGI managed to get 13x the throughput (and scaling had stopped) with a 28 way SGI Altix 3000 running Linux, BTW thats terrible.
Actually its not even clear that IBM donated any value at all revocation clauses not withstanding.
Closer scrutiny of the "500" patents "donated" by IBM reveal that some of them don't relate to software in any form and that all of them are due to require renewal.
Hard to say if this is a zero value donation or less than that. However it did have value from IBM's perspective since it quite clearly fooled the credulous.
Sun's leadership developed a license that is almost GPL-like, yet they purposely went out of their way in making it incompatible with the GPL. This is a clear sign of contempt for the GPL. It may be too late for them to switch their other products over to this license, they'd lose all credibility, but if they could they would. They still aren't able to articulate a defense for their action, only that they don't see the big deal. This from a company that uses the GPL in other open source products. Most open source advocates haven't missed the message on this one.
And what would be the benefit of Solaris being released under GPL ?
Sure it would add to the number of lines of code available under GPL but would this be a benefit ? Not really
Could it be usefull to be able to incorporate code from the Solaris kernel in kernels such as Linux released under GPL ? Well possibly but the possible advantages are heavily outweighed by the practical dissadvantages.
Take dtrace, wonderfull technology but in order to impliment it in Linux you need to put probe points in the whole of the Linux kernel and the libraries, this is not a cut and paste excercise and to be honest the dprobes team would have done it already if Linus had thought it was useful which sadly he didn't.
How about Solaris scalability, its much better than Linux so simplistically you could imagine incorporating the components that make Solaris scale into Linux except that again you would end up having to re-engineer the whole of the Linux kernel and many of the libs.
How about the rather limited things that Linux does better than Solaris 10, single threaded performance being the only example I can think of, well again this touches so many parts of the system that its unlikely to be of benefit.
So what you end up as you almost always do is a religious argument based on hypothetical scenarios that have no substance in reality. Fine but don't image that it makes anyone with any sense or perspective think that Sun is out to damage GPL. It isn't and in fact all the evidence is that Sun is out to support GPL where it is sensible.
Don't confuse market tactics against a dangerous monopolistic rival (MS Office, Visual Studio) to be approval or acceptance of a license. Sun is fully aware which license is more effective (BSD or GPL) against M$, and have used it strategically. But, Sun's leadership is not how you make them out to be. They are the opposite. They could have easily made their license compatible with the GPL rather than exclude it, but they didn't.
The problem with your point is that it conveniently ignores two killer facts.
1. Sun was doing Open Source or something rather like it when the perceived wisdom was that this was a very stupid move commercially.
2. Sun's was founded on the belief that Open Standards and the pre-cursor to Open Source was the way to develop systems, Bill Joy when asked always said that the majority of the smart people in the world didn't work for you and so the trick was to harness their energies as well as Sun's hence the OpenSource, Open Standards approach. Most people would now call this enlightened self interest.
Yes! You took the words right out of my brain. The FSF is useful; they code. OSI is nothing but talk. Why would we let them represent us? Then with near lethal levels of unintentional irony ESR tells stallman to shut up and show him the code.
Hang on if this view was to prevail then "OpenSource " advocates would have to stop flaming Sun over Java and recognise that it has in fact been enormously usefull and a wonderfull donation. Since this is an impossible position for any true advocate to assume your view is bound to fail despite its obvious merit.
Sun started the abuse. Abrasive is when you rub your beard stubble; Sun's top executives' open hostility and condescension towards the GPL and Linux has been well documented for years in various news outlets. A backlash from the community isn't only expected, but understandable.
Rubbish, Sun has never been anti GPL how could they be they are the largest commercial donator of code under GPL. We have discussed OpenOffice in detail but Sun has also made huge donations to NetBeans, Grid Engine and a whole host of other GPL or GPL compatible projects. Any "backlash" from the community has been ill informed and hugely counter productive.
The reality is that certain elements of the OpenSource community have forgotten that Sun is the company that is most responsible for creating an environment where OpenSource can be viable. Sun has been comprehensively flamed over the way it has released Java but Java is freely available on OpenSource platforms and at the same time has progressed much more sucessfully than the OpenSource naysayers predicted.
Critics of Sun's stance on Java accuse Sun of arrogance, Sun quite rightly point to their Java track record and quite rightly ask their critics to explain how releasing Java under GPL would have improved the outcome.
Personally, I don't think companies should be praised or denegrated for doing business any more than a lion should be for killing or not killing it's next meal. Sun and IBM are companies. A company must make money at all costs. If killing the GPL and Linux would make IBM and Sun money, they'd do their best to do it (see M$).
Sun and IBM are very different companies and have very different track records. Long before the fashionable adoption of Linux and OpenSource Sun had a track record of supporting Open Standards and GPL in a climate where industry analysts considered this to be a major commercial mistake.
At the time IBM would not have been seen dead supporting Open Standards or making major donations to GPL because it did not make business sense to IBM.
Now Linux and OpenSource are fashionable and represents a real business opportunity and guess what IBM is trying to present itself as the OpenSource Linux company, don't mistake this for commitment this is simply business in a way that Sun's continued support for Open Standards and OpenSource is not.
The total number of people worldwide who would even know what that sentence means, much less be interested in doing it themselves, is so small as to round down to zero.
/ x-think15/ / x-matters33/
Of course but then the same applies to Linux, Java and almost every other technology discussed on slashdot. The % of people worldwide who understand the above vs the available population will always round down to 0.
Sadly this truism doesn't actually help your point does it.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format So?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Office_XML
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library
Lets hope these references help !!
LOL. Just making up statistics isn't going to get you anywhere.
Gartner, IDC and Bloor research have all concluded that Openoffice/StarOffice currently occupies 2and place in the Office Suite market behind MS-Office they all also conclude that OO/SO is the most complete competitior to MS-Office.
No, they're not. Let me repeat that, just to make sure you get it: No, they are not. They're "cool" only to the extent that they serve a purpose. That purpose can be one of two things: interoperability or transparency. Because nobody reads the Open Office file formats, interoperability is a non issue. (And nobody reads them because nobody writes them; Open Office is the nichest of the niche players.) And because nobody is archiving Open Office files, transparency doesn't count, either.
Sorry but the facts are rather different from your assertions.
I have worked with users who are doing exactly what you claim people arn't doing e.g working directly with OpenOffice XML files.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format
Finally OpenOffice is hardly an also ran in the Office space it is the second most used product behind MS-Office and in its StarOffice guise the most sucessfull commercially.
You are welcome to you opinions but please don't try passing them off as facts
Its good to see that Linux 2.6 kicked Solaris's ass.
So you think that Linux 2.6 being ~5% faster than a beta version of Solaris 10 is evidence that Linux 2.6 kicked Solaris's ass ??
Interesting, the reality is more like a wakeup call for Linux advocates. Single CPU performance is hardly Solaris's sweet spot up to now but Sun seem to have managed to deliver rather good single CPU performance which coupled with Solaris's undoubted scalability will make a rather daunting combination when compared with Linux.
That's a very good point. OpenOffice is great and all, but what if they have lots of macros written for the Office suite? Once OpenOffice has implemented compatibility with macros, there will be no reason to not switch. The other thing that occurred to me, is why do they feel like they have to upgrade? Why can't they stick with the version they have?
There are allready companies that will convert your MS-Office macros to StarOffice/OpenOffice macros as a one-time conversion.
This isn't always the answer because some of the MS-Macros use plugins that cannot be converted.
However a lot of the MS-Macros are unneccesary in OpenOffice/StarOffice this is because they are primarely aimed at taking data from some external source and stuffing it into a MS-Office formated file, typically word or excel. This is not really necessary in OO/SO because their XML file format allows you to do this directly without requiring macros.
As for versions, generally its support that drives upgrades these days in the windows space.
Ive always kinda thought of Solaris as a 4 wheel drive truck in low range, but it looks like they added a turbo :) I wonder if its a result of better x86 optimization or the new Filesystem
The test was done with standard Solaris UFS+ apparently they used forcedirectio. UFS+ on Solaris 10 is pretty much the same as UFS+ on Solaris 9.
I hope they re-run the tests on Solaris 10 when ZFS ships in the next release which is due mid year.
I was suprised by how close Solaris 10 was to Linux, after all they used a beta OS on a very tiny system, hardly Solaris's sweet spot in the past.
But Open Office is a big ol' steaming pile of crap. It's 1990s stuff. Why hasn't that horse been taking out back and put down yet? As long as Linux programmers are trying to catch up to 1997, the platform is doomed.
When did you last use OpenOffice ?? Obviously not recently, native XML files are enormously cool and something that every other office suite has had to play catchup with.
Oh, so you're just hanging this all on StarOffice: a product which for the majority of it's actual life was nurtured by Star Division and not Sun. Swooping down and buying something with ill gotten dot-bomb cash is unimpressive when considering that it was StarDivision that for years had the gumption to attempt to compete directly with Microsoft on their own turf.
You clearly never used the pre Sun StarOffice product, if you had as I did you would realise that your point doesn't really stand much close scrutiny. They are dramatically different products, Sun has sunk large amounts of cash into StarOffice/OpenOffice since buying StarDivision and in a climate that hardly compares with the heights of the dot com boom.
In addition Sun's donations to OpenSource hardly start and finish with OpenOffice as I said earlier last time anyone counted more of Red Hat had been donated by Sun than any other commercial entity including Red Hat.
And of course you then get to Java, now many OpenSource pedants will claim that Sun's license for Java isn't open but frankly this is an argument that is rather like the Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of Christianity claiming that they suscribe to totally different religions.
Fact is Java has developed rather well, despite claims to the contrary there is a lot of 3rd party involvement in the process and Java is widely and freely available.
In the process Sun has avoided the pitfalls of forking Java and at the same time provided the Linux community with the single most usefull tool to allow Linux to penetrate into the commercial server space.
As an aside despite having access to a detailed specification for Java with no need to reverse engineer the platform there is currently no OpenSource Java implimentation that could be described as remotely complete.
And your point about competing with Microsoft on their own turf is hugely ammusing, hands up which major systems vendor is competing with Microsoft on their onw turf with a Linux based desktop ???
Yup it is only Sun who has the gumption to do this. IBM are happy to consult on the feasbility of doing this but products !!!! Ohh no
The problem with Sun is that they can't decide whether or not they want to help us or to FUD us to death. This is why they get less respect than IBM
FUD who exactly, if you are a Red Hat advocate then yes consider yourself FUDDED but don't try to wrap yourself in a Linux flag followed by an OpenSource flag to try to claim that Sun has been FUDDING OpenSource. Sun has absolutely no interest in assaulting OpenSource and only marginal Red Hat related interest in FUDDING Linux.
Apathy is far better than slander
Odd Sun is the single vendor most responsible for creating the enviroment that allows Linux to exist and the largest commercial donator to the OpenSource community but you end up prefering style over substance. Give me substance over style anyday.
Don't know but it would be very bad news if they did.
I recently discussed the OpenOffice.org program with Bruce Perens, he isn't impressed with Sun's attempts to create a large community of external developers for OpenOffice.
Afterwards it did occur to me that Bruces concerns might well be driven by the worry that if Sun takes too much flak from the OpenSource community then their exit from things like OpenOffice would shoot the program in the head.
I doubt that this would happen but perhaps the reason why Sun gets so much flak is because the OpenSource community is almost uniquely dependant on Sun's good will.
NFS, PAM, XFN, etc that you list... the standard was set by Sun as an open standard, but the open source versions of them were reinvented on the outside, not donated by Sun.
Wrong Sun has released the NFS source code and they also funded the University of Michigan to do a Linux port.
And last time anyone actually counted Sun had more code attributed to it in the Red Hat distribution than any other commercial company including Red Hat. OpenOffice is definitely a huge chunk of GPL code, but they also didn't develop that. They purchased a dying company and opensourced the company's product. It was a cheap move aimed at poking holes in Microsoft's officeware dominance.
Hardly cheap Sun paid 59.5 million dollars for StarDivision and still employs most of their staff who now work on the OpenOffice program.
Its also hardly dying
How about the cheap move of releasing 500 patents that are all due to expire and calling that a great donation. Did you applaud IBM's donation ???
I know full well about Sun's positions on the matter. I've raised the merits of Open Source repeatedly to my Sun sales and technical representatives, who generally frown at me and hand me Sun company dogma about how they're going to crush linux into the ground, and that open source is just a phase.
You think you do and thats obviously part of the problem. Don't worry though you have plenty of company.
You seem to disregard the fact that 1600 patents that you can't use due to strings attached are actually harmful (you need to avoid them, Sun explicitly said the license is GPL-incompatible on purpose) while 500 patents that you don't need to use are harmless. Besides, let's see how Sun clarifies the "we don't know yet whether we want to retain the rights to sue our developers for patent infringement over these" stance.
Hardly, I don't care if my kernel is developed under CDDL or GPL so assuming its CDDL then the patents are very usefull.
And on the flip side how do you know that any of the 500 patents IBM have "gifted" actually protect you from anything ?
The Sun donation is actually rather safer than the IBM one, that is unless you are interested in screw closures in which case there isn't anything Sun can do to help you.
IBM: Here are 500 patents and their terms SUN: Day 1: There will be something, maybe Patents SUN: Day 2: 1500 Patents! SUN: Day 3: For Open Source SUN: Day 4: Only Our Open Source SUN: Day 5: We are still thinking of terms. SUN: Day 6: Real Soon Now
Day 7: IBM sorry we forgot to tell you but those 500 patents we gave you they were all expiring.
Day 8: IBM and some of them arn't applicable to software (but 500 is a nice round number).
Day 9: IBM but they are compatible with GPL.
So who is the idiot ??????
You're counting contributions by sun employees semi-officially and/or on their own time. Sun as a corporate entity isn't as giving to the GPL as you have portrayed them.
Really, so you have never heard of OpenOffice just the largest single donation of source under GPL (made by Sun) and Sun still continues to be by far in away the largest contributor with something like 100 full time staff.
Heard of gnome Sun is heavily involved in Gnome. They have made big donations to Apache, Mozilla and a whole range of other OpenSource projects.
Where do you think the NFS source code came from, PAM, XFN ext the list is pretty endless.
Perhaps Sun's problem is that they have given too much and given it in too wide a swathe of areas. Perhaps Sun should have concentrated on one narrow area like say donating a filesystem to run alongside all the other available filesystems with pretty much identical capabilites. Now who was that ??
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Sun's founders most notably Bill Joy come from a precursor of OpenSource so you could say that it is ingrained in Sun's culture. But more important than that is Sun's core belief that industry should innovate around open standards. Few companies now would publically disagree with this stance but when Sun started expousing this doctrine it was universally ridiculed by the same companies HP, IBM etc that the OpenSource (really Linux) community hold up to Sun as exemplars of how to support OpenSource. All this does is make the Linux advocates propounding these propositions look ridiculous and ungratefull to Sun and for that matter to anyone with any grasp of computing history.
Royally? Is it all at the forbearance of Scott McNeally, or is Scott McNeally at the forbearance of the skills, initiative and connections of people who work for Sun?
I don't know the answer to that you would need to talk to someone who works for Sun. However Scott and Johnathan sign the checks and the fact that they keep signing the checks to support a huge range of OpenSource projects from OpenOffice to Apache tends to suggest that it is Scott and Johnathan who are being forebearing.
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Sun responds when its pushed and does so with vigour, the OpenSource (linux) community pushes a lot and gets back rather less than it deserves.
For some strange reason the OpenSource (linux) community is much more receptive to blandishments from IBM. As an example the current ludicrous discussion about the merits of IBM's 500 expiring some non SW patent "donation" to OpenSource vs Sun's donation of 1600 current patents but under a license that not everyone likes. IBM's donation would appear to be largely useless but has no strings attached, Sun's appears to be very usefull but has strings as usual the community has become obsessed with the strings.
In my opinion if the OpenSource community wants to have a better relationship with by far its largest commercial backer then its largely up to the OpenSource community. Less whinging, less focus on style and more focus on substance would go a long way.
IMHO It's a bit stupid if Sun looks into getting their hands on an existing database in order to open-source it afterwards.
Its a good thing that they ignored your advice or similar when Sun bought StarDivision otherwise OpenOffice would not exist now would it Sun did buy a DBMS sometime ago when they bought Clustra which is currently used as part of their J2EE app server.
It's going to be released under CDDL if anything. This in itself denies its use by most of the open source world. *sigh* why does Sun have to keep on trying to destroy Linux and the GPL?
Sigh, Sun is the largest single commercial donator of source under GPL dwarfing IBM, SGI, HP and all the other commercial entities involved in GPL by a wide margin.
Just for laughs and to illustrate how risable your point is at the last count more of the Red Hat distribution had been donated by Sun than any other commercial entiry including Red Hat.
The more I read OpenSource (really Linux) advocates flaming Sun for some imagined misdemeanor or other the more I tend to conclude that Sun has been remarkably forbearing with the community as a whole and that if Sun have been a bit rude on occasions they have been rather less rude then the community right royally deserves.
Lets face it if you were to single out one major commercial player who has almost single handed made it possible for Linux ot exist its actually not IBM, SGI, HP but Sun. They were largely responsible for the creation of the commercial UNIX market, they were almost exclusively responsible for insisting on published standards, API's etc and they have made huge donations to the basic plumbing of Linux.
Sadly these hugely worthy but clearly boring activities are nothing compared to the IBM/HP/SGI eye candy which has little to do with fostering open standards and OpenSource and everything to do with moving tin, SW and services.
Sure they are abrasive but lets face it in the face of the abuse they have received I would be pissed as hell as well, talk about biting the hand that feeds.
The $1.9B was a one-time payment.
Actually it wasn't there is also a patent exchange agreement which would allow MS to pay royalties to Sun if there is a significant inbalance between the two companies patent portfolio (which there is at the moment).
IBM's gift is clearly better; even if IBM's patents weren't worth anything, at least they do no harm to FOSS.
Since it is now apparent that the 500 IBM patents you refer to were due to expire and that some of them don't even relate to software your point is highly questionable. Imagine developing code under GPL using IP derived from one of the "gifted" patents only to discover that you arn't in fact protected at all.
Yup, Sun is trying to pull another fast one, like they did with Java. Fortunately, this time, we're smarter (and Java is on its way out, too).
I have always "admired" the OpenSource communitys propensity to savage the people who in reality are providing them with the greatest assistance.
You may not like the Java licence but it is available on Linux, its developing and its also the mainstay of commercial Linux deployments. Does the Linux version lag Solaris or Windows and lack functionality ?? Is Sun the only company making money out of Java ??
And the sad reality which is unfolding is that it isn't Sun who has pulled a fast one but IBM unless you think that releasing a patent for a screw closure under the banner of a SW patent release is straight dealing.
How about barraging IBM with requests to OpenSource AIX or their crown jewels DB2 ???
All you have demonstrated in this post is the usual OpenSource concentration on style over substance. Sun is actually the largest single commercial donator of code under GPL let alone their other licenses. Sun however also has perfectly justified pops at Red Hat which earns them bad style points with some OpenSource advocates
IBM is going to drop the J-Bomb next week, an open-sourced Java SDK, at which point a whole lot of people are going to say, "Huh? Sun who?". I've got a dollar bet that that SDK is going on the ISO track which makes a whole other group of people happy.
Well instead of Sun who, how about IBM what. Which I guess boils down to the current strange propensity of the OpenSource commnunity to look very hard at a Sun gift horse but let the IBM gift horse prance by without any scrutiny at all.
I say this because it now turns out that the 500 patents IBM have "donated" to the OpenSource community are all due to expire and some of them aint even for software. One refers to a screw closure while another refers to a medical early warning system.
Still they are all compatible with GPL so why let small details like their usefullness get in the way of a perfectly fine Sun bashing session.
This would be hugely funny if it wasn't for the fact that its yet another example of the OpenSource community savaging their friends while cosying up to the people who have absolutely no interest in their survival.
No, I've explained this in pieces on Slashdot and elsewhere. I should put them all together and publish that
That would seem to be the only sensible option.
Reasoned argument is easier to appreciate if it is assembled in one place rather than scattered randomly about.