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Sun-isms Debunked
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Nov 19, 2004 12:09 AM
from the linux-not-just-red-hat dept.
from the linux-not-just-red-hat dept.
Newman writes "We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux. This guy at NewsForge really grilled them at the Solaris launch party last Monday, and actually got some straight answers out of them. At the end of the article, both execs have some specific words for Slashdot readers."
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What day of the week is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun. Get bought, go bankrupt, develop a *real* open source strategy, just something. I'm tired of the bullshit.
Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
74K shouldn't *get* you anything. I make well over that but when I was dating I never let on that I made that kind of money. I dress like a typical guy, drive a typical car, live in a typical place. Hell, I got flat ignored at a Honda dealer when I was trying to buy a car, and I wasn't going to be financing--blank check was in pocket ready to pay.
If you're smart, you date 10's, and you marry 7-8's with great personalities and intellect. All the hot in the world doesn't mean a damn thing if you can't have an intelligent conversation with her. This, of course, is assuming that you yourself are able to carry on an intelligent conversation, but given the audience here, the vast majority of us are.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
*shrug*. Personally, I'd probably be investigating Solaris 10 as a platform for deploying my company's products, but I'm already too busy moving from RHEL3 to SLES9 -- and a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant and would need to be rewritten. Only so many hours in a day, etc.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
DTrace, and other kernel related goodies, would be extremely hard to fit into the overall scheme of how the Linux kernel currently works. In other words, the investment to make it work in Linux would be significantly higher.
The parent claimed that Sun should have dropped a more mature, more cohesive, more scalable kernel and turned their attention to the Linux kernel. That's flat ludicrous from an investement standpoint. "Hey, we've done all the work in our kernel, let's just do it all over again with a new kernel that doesn't work even remotely the same way as ours, so we have to do pretty much the same amount of work all over again."
If your argument is that Linux is easier to use because of GNU stuff....guess what? You can add all that stuff to Solaris and it works great. You don't even have to compile the majority of it, you can pull it off the Solaris companion CD or (gasp) out of the several GNU tools that are now officially part of the supported OS.
a good chunk of our security-related infrastructure is somewhat OS-dependant
I sympathize, and I wouldn't try to get you to change. But I'd like to point out that this problem effectively makes Linux just as proprietary in a "lock in" sense as Solaris. You're locked in. If it does the job you need it to do, that's not necessarily a problem, but I hope the hard core zealots reading this recognize the spurious nature of arguing "but Linux is OPEN". Once Solaris 10 is open source, even the argument of being able to continue on without Sun in the marketplace goes belly up.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like hand-waving. It's been pointed out before that submitting lots of code "into the community" is no guarantee it'll be vetted properly. The pool of genuinely talented linux hackers is large, but not infinite. And the subset of this that is likely to decide "hell this is a cool project i'm gonna go work on it" is often zero for many projects (go look at the effectively abandoned projects all over).
Sun has their own pool of engineers, and plenty of them are *very* good. If they have their own resources in terms of engineering talent, you can't possibly blame them for wanting to use it on their 'own' product? it guarantees x number of eyeballs looking at it in a directed way and with it being literally their "day job".
"Opening it to the community" only means that the ones who are interested in it and are capable of doing it (both in terms of talent and time) will work on it. there's plenty of things that ought to be done in linux that have not yet been done...
Less legal hastle and licensing costs, as mentioned, than opening up all of Solaris. Evidently Sun didn't have full rights to all the code, so they had to buy them up first
The battle against SCO may well have given the wrong impression considering their sheer incompetence and general rubbish-osity, but if you don't think things are being cooked up in Redmond right now, a cluestick awaits your head.
The warning shots have already been fired - Ballmer's running around telling Asian governments there's patent issues with Linux - and the *real* battles (MS patent infringement claims against Linux) have yet to be fought. Software patents are the key battle to be fought - if Europe adopts US-style software patents, if the global system evolves even more towards a system that favours large corporations vs individual groups/community hackers, well, you know who the biggest software company out there is?
PR. Switching entirely to Linux would have given Sun an enormous boost in respect and confidence -- especially among geeks but also among investors concerned about Sun's bottom line. All that independent R&D costs big bucks. And, after all, Linux is now a media / wall street darling.
I'm sure Sun has their reasons, but I'd imagine they are fairly short term.
I can't believe you mention wall street and then complain about "short term". The purported boost would be quite worthless for Sun. The minute they announce anything remotely close to sounding like they're abandoning Solaris, they will haemorrhage customers as fast as... HP losing VMS/Alpha customers. Sun's apparently picking up quite a lot of business from this group, they're perfectly aware of what happens when your installed base sees you jumping ship.
If they did it, there'd be a major splash of publicity, sure. That's definitely gonna pay the bills. (it's not even clear it'd be *positive* publicity. "Sun Surrenders" is probably what plenty of analysts etc. will plunk on their front pages).
There might be a tiny spike in the share price that would be wiped out by the downward spiral pretty quickly.
Independent R&D costs big bucks? Hell yeah. Should I presume you're a big "oh-we-used-to-say-we-don't-do-ANY-R&D-which-is-wh y-we're-gonna-kill-all-those-who-do" Dell fanboy? IBM's often quoted as a major friend-of-OSS, but any real-$$ investments they have made are targeted towards things that are beneficial to themselves and/or hurtful to enemies (e.g. Eclipse). I don't see them contributing to improve linux performance on Itaniums, for example.
There's no fundamental difference between that and Sun coughing up the $$ into their own targets on their own platform.
You'll note IBM hasn't GPL-ed AIX either and decided to support linux exclusively.
There IS a good thing coming out
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Sun Microsystems is SUNW not SUN
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Well once you've got around to installing the GNU tools onto Solaris, it's every bit as usuable as Linux.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest difference, to my mind, is that Linux is a collection of tools all written by different people without a whole lot of coordination to the idea of consistency of interface. Yeah, most of the GNU tools are consistent, but there are a lot of useful and/or necessary Linux packages that aren't GNU and don't conform to the GNU "way". So instead of "getting" the general idea about how things work and being able to apply it across the product, you have to figure out each piece's "way" of doing things as you go. Much harder to keep straight unless you're doing it all the time every day.
As for Red Hat "enterprise ready" offerings, I spit in their general direction. I just had a coworker trying to configure a Red Hat box with "enterprise" level SAN storage. With Solaris, you load the SAN packages, which are clearly documented and easy to find, you plug in your SAN, and away you go. If you need to make changes on the fly, there are a couple of commands to accomplish it, and you're done. With Red Hat, you go find the kernel drivers, load the kernel source, compile the kernel drivers, try to figure out what needs to be done to tell the kenel drivers about the storage....etc. Maybe it's a process that's not terribly difficult to do once you've done it a couple times, but it's a major hassle to figure out, as there's no particularly good documentation on how to do it.
That's not easy to use.
As for major financial institutions flying with the flavor of the week, if you've actually been involved in the decisions to do that sort of thing, you'll understand that such decisions are 90% of the time politically and "buzzword" driven as much as technology driven, if they're technology driven at all. If they want to replace the small Sun boxes they have with Linux boxes, more power to them. I have yet to hear of a credible case of ripping out a 6500, a 6800, a 10k or a 15k and replacing it with linux boxes.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's $500 per COPY, installed or installation media.
It's not that I don't like linux[1]-- it's just the user community has so many members who are down on *every* other operating system, even those that should be the natural allies, that it poisons the well, so to speak. (I saw this same sort of thing in the days of the Amiga -- there were people who wished _ill_ on the Atari ST and MacOS, and fostered nothing but ill-well towards themselves in return...)
Remember, monocultures suck. This applies even if All The World Runs Linux[2].
From where I'm sitting, there's more bull coming out of the Linux community than out of Sun.
[1] I actually like linux, and have been using it continuously since my first pre-1.0 slackware installation (I still have those floppy disks!) on a 5meg '386 (Egads, that was a crappy machine. Five times the RAM than my Amiga 1000, and the best thing going for it was that I could run a *nix-lookalike OS so I could write code at home and have a chance of it compiling at school.)
[2] Different distributions don't count as "different", just as different versions of Win32 API systems don't count as "different". What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, folks.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of long-time Linux users want to like the company. They've always fought for Unix, even when NT was supposed to be the up and coming thing. They've provided all kinds of interesting technology and research, and even open sourced it occasionally. Most of us would certainly rather work on Solaris than on Windows when forced to use a proprietary system. We realize what an enourmous gift the openoffice codebase was. Before Linux really emerged, maybe we could still get away with using it at work, saying that we could always move things over to a "real Unix" like Solaris... they were sort of like a benevolent older brother who would could call if the situation got really scary. So they're in a position to be well regarded.
But they've frittered away a lot of this good will. Between the money to SCO, the digs at Linux as marketing strategy, and this on again off again view of open source, I don't feel that comfortable with them any more. It's like Linux grew up, and the girls have started to be more interested in it, and the formerly looked-up-to older brother is now going around saying nasty things about it.
So it's not about disliking Solaris, which looks to be a nice system, it's about having doubts about Sun and their corporate strategy. They need to make up their mind about being our friends or not, instead of smiling and trying to stab us in the back.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to TFA, this money was necessary to obtain extended rights which would allow them to open source Solaris. Which they're going to do now.
the digs at Linux as marketing strategy
Shock: Company criticises competing OS ! Peronally I find that their comments, even though partial and biased (how could it be otherwise ?) are still much, much more objective than 99% of the typical linux fanboy comment about Solaris.
and this on again off again view of open source
Uh ? According to TFA (again), it took them years to make Solaris ready for open sourcing, buying or recoding away third-party stuff. As for open-sourcing Java, the Boss has always been rather clear that the current Java community process was exactly what they felt they need: the community can control the development of the platform, but the code doesn't get forked into incompatible fractal branches of vanishingly thin relevance. Maybe they learnt something from the Unix wars after all.
I mean, damn, they give you open office, Java and now they are open sourcing the best Unix environment out there - what more do you need ?
Thomas-
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't *give* anyone Java. They own it, lock stock and barrel. They gave away openoffice, which is great, as I said.
What I'm attempting to communicate is that Sun seems to have an incoherent position with regards to Linux and Open Source. It's a question of posturing and image - IBM certainly hasn't open sourced all of their crown jewels, and yet are seen as friendlier to the open source world. "Seen" - it's, as I keep repeating, a matter of perception.
While it's not shocking that they bash Linux, as you say, that's hardly a way to take advantage of it and attempt to extract what value they can (as IBM and Novell are successfully doing).
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their view of Linux is very, very clear. Sun's is not.
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You make a confusion: Sun!=Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
At least SCO, since you mentioned it, is consistent. It keeps saying the same thing. "All your base are belong to us." Err... I mean, "We own Unix, Linux is evil pink commie stuff, everyone copied our code." I can deal with that.
Sun's upper management is plain old multiple-personality schizophrenic, taken as a whole. You never know with which personality you'll deal today. Or even at different hours in the same day. Will it be McNealy 1 who loves Linux and OSS more than he loves his mother? Or maybe McNealy 2 who doesn't even have any strategy, and just foams at the mouth worse than any zealot? Or McNealy 3 who's as convinced that Linux sucks as Darl from SCO is, and spreads FUD about Linux? Or who?
I wish Sun just made up its mind already. These fits and hourly changes of mind are getting tiresome.
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Go back to sleep. You have no "natural allies" (Score:5, Insightful)
People, this is not Tolkien, where the elves are your natural allies for eternity, and the orcs are your natural enemies. In Tolkien's world you know where you stand. It's a simplified world. That's why we like to escape to phantasy worlds: they're a refuge from the madness of the real world.
Real world is nowhere near that simple.
In the corporate world, there are no heroes in shiny spandex, and no villain cackling over death ray blueprints. There's only a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.
Throughout the history of computing, as little of it as we have, one thing stayed a constant: whoever is in the lead wants proprietary stuff and tries to lock you into their incompatible formats. Whoever is losing badly wants open standards and generally a fair chance to have a go at the big guys' locked-in customers.
Then the wheel turns, companies go from top to bottom and viceversa, and they switch the tune without missing a beat. And things stay the same. The ones who are now winning, try to lock you in, the ones at the bottom suddenly become open-standards evangelists.
That's why IBM and the rest are supporting Linux nowadays, for example. That's why Sun would even give away OpenOffice, even with sources, to try to break MS's file format lock-in.
There are a lot of has-beens in this industry. People who once owned the market, but were too stupid to keep it.
E.g., PCs once had to be "IBM Compatible", then it was "Intel Compatible", while nowadays it's "MS Windows Compatible". Intel doesn't single-handedly decide new architectures any more, but has to beg MS for support in Windows. (And just got refused recently!) IBM had its ass handed to it a longer time ago, when the PS/2 microchannel architecture was basically rejected by everyone else. The company that created the PC was no longer in control of its architecture. Novell once owned the network server market, but thought it could ignore NT and stick to charging outrageous prices. Prices for which you could buy not only 2 NT server licenses, but also 2 high end PCs to run them on. Etc.
And when they still were at the top, neither of them has acted any better than MS does. E.g., although nowadays "FUD" is synonimous with Microsoft, once it was synonimous with IBM: In fact, it was _invented_ by IBM.
Now all those has-beens are suddenly pro-Linux and pro-open-standards, to get their righteous vengeance against MS. But if either got back on top, they'd start doing the same shit all over again.
And Sun is the prime example. Sun is somewhere in the middle, and can't decide if it's losing, or still has a chance of being king. As soon as it thinks it's losing, it starts being a Linux zealot. As soon as it thinks "hey, maybe everyone will convert to Solaris if we port it to the Opteron", it starts openly trying to kill Linux.
And as management perceptions and sales figures fluctuate, pushing them a little up or a little down from that middle position, Sun flip-flops between the two extremes several times a month. Or sometimes even within the same day.
Sad.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're wrong - I think the original poster was just voicing his frustration with Sun.
I started my long love of all things Unix with IBM's AIX and Sun's SunOS 4. I even *own* a Sun machine at home. I also started with Linux when there were no distros - just the 0.12 kernel and a root floppy image which you used 'cp' to install on the hard drive.
But Sun is an incredibly frustrating company. Unlike Apple or IBM, they just don't seem to have any kind of strategy - they thrash and twist - one day they love RedHat, the next day they are telling us that RedHat are the spawn of Satan. One day they love Linux, the next day they hate it (despite it being a component of their Java desktop). Sun just seems to lack direction - and it's hardly surprising that Apple, despite competing directly with the commodity PC - now has a larger market cap than Sun.
I hate watching Sun destroy itself like it's doing. At least it looks like McNealy is coming out of his period of denial - his last statement in the article indicating that perhaps he realises that they have been alienating their developers.
The trouble is at the moment, with regards to a strategy: IBM gets it, Apple gets it, the Linux distro makers get it - but Sun doesn't get it (and neither does Microsoft). But unlike Microsoft which can continue through sheer inertia, Sun can't and they have to formulate some kind of useful strategy and stick to it - or they are gonna be toast. If they continue as they are, in 10 years time there will be no more Sun.
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit? Sun's stock has steadily gone up over 60% since August, all in anticipation of Solaris 10, Niagara, fighting off losers like Kodak, etc. Sun is going through another one of its re-invention cycles, and will have massively-multi-threaded systems in the next two years with Solaris 10, complete with super-fast TCP/IP and through-and-through checksums on ZFS (among other things).
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Re:What day of the week is it? (Score:5, Informative)
So what's left to sell? Intel boxes? AMD64 Boxes? Sparc workstations?
Do you really see Sun sustaining itself with those products? I don't.
There is only one thing that sun has that could make it money and that's patents.
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If only ... (Score:4, Funny)
Then they would have given you a cheeseburger and a coke on your way out?
Sun's hardware does run linux well (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sun's hardware does run linux well (Score:5, Insightful)
ok, I'm tired and ranting about the usuability of old computers to feed a troll, I think I'll go to bed now....
--Anubis
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From the memory hole... (Score:5, Interesting)
Discuss.
He doesn't understand patents (Score:5, Informative)
Using software that infringes a patent violates system and probably method claims. Unless you have a contract agreement with the software company that says they'll protect you against patent infringement lawsuits then you're screwed. And if you know the software you're using infringes a patent then you're screwed x3.
The reason you rarely see companies going after users is because they tend not to have as much money as the company making the software.
It's all about the hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Right now the only thing that differentiates Sun from the rest of their market place is their expensive high end hardware. They need to squeese as much out of it as possible till it caves into the x86 - 64 commodity CPU market. Then their ability to gain high profit margins will be gone, as well as their position to compete in the computer space. Part of that differentation is solaris, that's way they need to squeese as much out of it as they can even if Linux is the one taking over the server-space industry.
Re:It's all about the hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
However, having a unified OS and desktop across their entire product line will be a bonus.
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Re:It's all about the hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It's all about the hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
If a tenth of the money spent on making the x86-64 crap work were spent on optimizing the SPARC systems, we'd have have ultra-cheap SPARC CPUs for the commodity market.... SPARC has been 64-bit for a long time now. The x86 is a johnny-come-lately to this arena, and is still playing catch-up.
Oh, it's "squeeze", by the way.
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Dear Mr. McNealy (Score:4, Interesting)
maybe then you can show some good faith and put some action behind those words? don't want to open up java any more? fine, then at least remove the ridiculous redistribtion limitations [freebsd.org]
since you're giving away the software, you're left to making $$ from hardware and services. try being a little more friendly with those seeking to buy your hardware [openbsd.org], and maybe you'll see a resurgence in hardware sales
because of the tactics you've employed in the past, i chose to not buy an opteron system from you and instead opted for another vendor. change your tactics and perhaps you'll start seeing a resurgance of your customer base
Trusted Solaris 8 / SELinux (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit more complicated than that. If you read the SELinux FAQ [nsa.gov]:
The NSA itself says that it's NOT one, so on its own SELinux is not good enough for secure US government work, despite its being developed by the NSA.
Still can't see how Sun will survive (Score:5, Interesting)
Outside of academia, the only reason people bought smaller Sun boxes is so they could develop for Sun's big iron with minimal migration issues at deployment or "scaling up" time. With the disappearance of Sun's big iron market, their low level market disappeared as well.
Open sourcing Solaris 10 is fine and dandy, but I think it's too little too late. There's brands of Linux and BSD (e.g. RHES, Debian, SE Linux, OpenBSD) that cover every one of Sun's old sweet spots (e.g. uptime, security, Oracle support,
Bottom line: Where is their sweet spot for selling their product? Why would I buy Sun these days?
It's a pity - Sun had a terrific product line that no-one else could match, but they didn't see the tide turning.
Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, that's why all those sites survive the slashdot effect.. oh wait, no they don't. We have a mix of Intels, Suns, and xserves. About 50 servers in total, the sun boxes are still the most reliable and powerful. We have 8 year old E220s that can still handle 512 simultaneous mysql threads and 1024 apache processes. The mysql process alone uses 2 gigs of ram.
The last time our main webserver was rebooted was for Y2K patches.
Yes, Intels and xserves make good servers, but we do lose harddrives and ethernet cards on them. We don't worry about the sun hardware.
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Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
BLAM. That's IT.
You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.
That money makes your box Sun's priority. Period. They'll FIX IT. Software or hardware. They'll roll you custom Solaris patches, because you're paying for it.
You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf.
There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.
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Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive (Score:5, Informative)
Every Sun purchase I've seen has been ultimately driven by support and reliability/uptime. Sun recognised this, and focused on building hardware and software to address reliability/uptime in particular. What's changed is that, while Solaris has more features than Linux in some ways, those features are primarily related to uptime which isn't that big a deal any more.
Why not?
- for every useful feature that Sun adds in, someone in Linux-land will eventually see that feature as a good thing and work will be done to port that feature to Linux. The porting to Linux of an existing Sun feature can be done faster than Sun can think up and build new features, and as Linux pushes more and more into the enterprise, the focus will become more and more on replicating Sun's advantages in Linux. The numbers are simply against Sun managing to stay ahead
- to a very large extent, you can achieve uptime by scaling "wide" i.e. throwing more boxes at the problem. It's absolutely not a panacea to all uptime issues, but it's an approach that fits particularly well with Linux/Intel due to the low incremental cost of the hardware. Whatever "uptime smarts" Sun can add to their OS, I and many others can achieve the same results (in pure uptime terms) by bolting a bunch of new Intel boxes into a rack
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Re:Still can't see how Sun will survive (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? - for every useful feature that Sun adds in, someone in Linux-land will eventually see that feature as a good thing and work will be done to port that feature to Linux. The porting to Linux of an existing Sun feature can be done faster than Sun can think up and build new features, and as Linux pushes more and more into the enterprise, the focus will become more and more on replicating Sun's advantages in Linux.
That is presuming that realizing that feature will not require redesigning the linux kernel to implement it. (No chance of that happening quickly until IBM can sucessfully fork linux.)
- to a very large extent, you can achieve uptime by scaling "wide" i.e. throwing more boxes at the problem. It's absolutely not a panacea to all uptime issues, but it's an approach that fits particularly well with Linux/Intel due to the low incremental cost of the hardware. Whatever "uptime smarts" Sun can add to their OS, I and many others can achieve the same results (in pure uptime terms) by bolting a bunch of new Intel boxes into a rack
The key to that strategy is that everything Sun can do with its upscalable platforms can be matched by linux running on another box. That is just not the case. You're enhancing reliablity by adding another point of failure? It may be possible to add redundancy to improve uptime, but that doesn't come without a physical cost. And how are those boxes going to consume less power than an integrated server?
Don't be shocked if five years from now, PC's aren't used at server farms. Why have thousands of PCs running linux, consuming all that electricity in computing and air conditioning, and physical space? Instead, have 5 "Sun Server Bazillion"s. You need more computing power, slap in a hotpluggable CPU, rather than another PC machine. No need to implement a networking grid for all those PCs. The only networking needed is the server to the outside world router. Have two-four overpaid sysadmins or a battery of employee salaries to maintain a battery of PCs
In piecemeal ways, webserver companies are already moving this way with low powered CPUs and fiddling with "blade" machines. A smart marketing team with a smart engineering team could easily bring Sun back into the server market. Not the mom & pop ISPs, but the AOLs and Verisigns of the world. Their problem is that their hardware is not quite designed to hotswap CPUs and memory like hard drives, they haven't configured a software product to realize this vision, their OS is still relatively esoteric, and they margin themselves out of profitability. But none of those things are impossible to correct.
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A lot of enterprise and carrier class customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun doesn't have Wall Street? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, like the author really knows what he's talking about. Wall Street is Sun's to lose. Everyone likes solaris, it's just slow and the hardware is expensive. Now that Sun's moving downmarket, it's faster and the hardware is cheaper.
Last I was in the space (over a year ago) Sun was losing share in the lower middle market, but the high-end was sticking in a wait-and-see mode. Their share on WS might have collapsed dramatically, but the numbers from IDC (unit shipment) don't bear that out.
So I guess the reporter was exaggerating to make a point? Does he actually have data to back this up?
my impressions (Score:5, Interesting)
Security, et al (Score:5, Informative)
In consequence, Netscape's SSL is considered acceptable for Government use (and DES has only just had its permission revoked), but the DoD's own implementation of IPSec and the NSA's work on SELinux are not. Rijndael-128 is OK, but Rijndael-256 is not. Even though all the evidence so far is that both versions of Rijndael are perfectly good.
A version of SuSE Linux (with help and funding from IBM) has been certified by the NSA as secure under the "Common Criteria" at about the same sort of level as Windows NT. This was on a PC I believe. No other platform for Linux, and no other distribution of Linux, has been certified.
So, you CAN run that specific version of SuSE on the specific PC platform it was tested on on military unclassified or confidential networks. Because so few OS' have been certified (only a tiny number of Unix manufacturers have the money for the approval process, never mind the development!!!) it's common practice to run any "approved" OS on Secret and Top Secret networks, even though they're not supposed to.
(Having worked as a contractor for the DoD, I can tell you that it is also not uncommon for software companies to request and receive waivers exempting them from NSA security auditing. The main appeal of COTS solutions, such as Microsoft, is that it's a lot cheaper than most GOTS solutions and the quality is about the same.)
For real "military grade" security (the stuff the military would like, if they weren't spending all their money in strip clubs) you'd need to take one of the existing security patches and add the following:
All that would give Linux a clearance comparable to the old B2 or B1 levels, which would be more than adequate for most classified networks. Relative to the work already put into Linux, it's really not that much. If IBM and SGI wanted to pool resources to make a B2/B1 version of Linux, I see absolutely no reason why they couldn't.
Now comes the fun part! What if you were to do all the above, and then do a line-by-line full coding audit with formal validation? IBM has something like 10,000 Linux coders. There are 50,000,000 lines of code. Assuming you could do the audit at no more than 10 lines a day, it would take 100 days to audit the kernel to this degree. For a real bare-bones box, it would probably take about the same to do the user-space stuff.
What would this give you? Well, the ONLY COTS Operating System to be A1-certifiable. There simply aren't any other. Nobody makes software to the A1 standard. At least, not that
Sun is not anti-Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun is not anti-Linux, Sun sells Linux, Sun will even sell you a full rack of x86 servers all running Linux. Get over it, Slashdot!
Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous.. (Score:5, Informative)
UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers. If you're going to compare a server virtualization feature, compare to something like the Xen Virtual Machine [cam.ac.uk], in this performance comparison [cam.ac.uk], you can see the performance of UML is rather appalling, especially compared to Xen.
The performance of Solaris Grid Containers is more akin to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, the advantage N1 Grid Containers have over Xen is that they are portable to every platform Solaris runs on (SPARC, IA32, AMD64) whereas Xen only emulates one platform (IA32). Also, other Solaris features to which there are currently no Linux counterparts such as the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows a N1 Grid Container to be bound to certain processors, and given a dedicated percentage (or share) of available processor resources. This provides an advantage over Xen and UML which can't even use multiple CPUs. It has an advantage over FreeBSD jails where monopolization of system resources by a single jail cannot be easily avoided.
While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.
Solaris 10 zones were inspired by FreeBSD Jail's (Score:5, Informative)
It's interesting that FreeBSD influence is getting
recognition at SUN... Maybe now they will be persuaded
to support some of their products on FreeBSD.(aka Java, and yes, i know about the FreeBSD java group
and their agreement on the 1.3.X jdk with sun)
Shoot your marketing department. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Tell them that we're returning to our roots," Schwartz said, referring to the company's renewed focus on the Solaris operating environment.
"And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added. It was the first time all day that I felt that the two had broken character and simply told me what was on their minds.
As a long time Slashdotter who has had to use and deploy Solaris on occasion, let me tell Mr. McNealy and Mr. Scwartz what's on my mind about Sun. I know they'll be reading, so here goes:
First, cut the marketing BS. No press wars with Redhat, IBM or HP. No trumped up, spin laden press releases about Solaris 10. I don't even want to see a comaprison paper. Give me a technical white paper about what the OS can do and STFU - I then can see for myself whether Solaris 10 is a good or great OS. I can also then decide for myself if it's a good fit in my architecture. Most on Slashdot are technically adept - that's why we can run and support Linux or *BSD without Redhat's help. It's the PHBs who require that kind of hand holding, not us. (Hey, I just invented a new comic book villian - Spin Laden, the Marketing Terrarist!)
Open your dev process, as well as your code. I don't (necessarily) mean provide CVS access, I mean accept and credit quality patches to the code base. Open code would mean we can fix our own damned stuff when things in Solaris break and get our jobs done, while benefiting anyone else who has the same bug - we tend to like to share the fact we're smart enough to repair someone else's broken code. For large contributions, pay the contributor and pay him well.
Stay away from the rest of my systems unless I ask you in. No embedded Java in the OS, no Sun only core stuff (think Microsoft and Kerberos 5), just a big box of properly impelmented tools that I can use to make systems work, work well and work reliably. Your products will be sharing my network with other vendors, so play nice whenever you can. If that means re-writing some Solaris code to put into linux so it interoperates properly and GPLing it, so be it. That way I know that you're concerned about me and not just "maximizing value".
Contriubute to the industry. Some of us think RMS is a real looney, but we have the utmost respect him and his contributions. Mr. Gates, IMHO, does not contribute to the general cause or making my life easier unless there's a price tag, be it in dollars or having to shut out one of his colleagues - he calls them compeditors - from my architecture. Real contributions move the whole industry forward, and provide new opportunities for everyone to make a little $_CURRENCY, not just a select few.
Censure that person who 'escorted' out the interviewer. We like plain talk. We know you have fiduciary responsibilities, and most of us try to take those into account, but trying to hide what you really want to say doesn't wash. If you hate linux or love it, say so, and say why - with no spin on the matter. Speaking of plain talk, you'll get some from us. We know you're the head of a big, powerful Corp., but you should be willing to learn from us. When it comes to putting the tech on the floor, we are your betters, not your underlings.
Lastly, put your engineering department off limits to marketing personnel. OFF-LIMITS. Spin Laden should be shot on sight (by a Nerf gun, of course) if he dares tread where something cool is being made. No "That's a killer system, and we can leverage it to sell..." baloney please. I'm still loathe to implement AD because it's actually proprietary technology, even though it would make administrating my network a little easier.
Thanks for tuning in to my little rant. HAND.
Soko
Re:Shoot your marketing department. (Score:5, Insightful)
Active Directory is a pretty standard LDAP database. The MS-specific stuff is even passed via option fields in queries; that's why my Linux clients can authenticate to an Active Directory domain and receive settings about networking, access control on network resources, etc. from them.
You can't apply GPOs to Linux boxes, obviously, but you can have them in the domain -- and have them work normally.
Parent
In the hope someone important at Sun reads this (Score:5, Interesting)
I've done development work and sysadmin work on Sun boxes and on linux boxes. I have consistently found that linux boxes come set up in a way that is well-fitted to my usage, whereas operating under remote Solaris environments is a struggle (this comes from having worked on it as developer or user in three separate and very different organisations). In all cases I have had a struggle to get these three key tools installed in environments (and at times lost) where it's been perfectly obvious to anyone with a clue that they are important. (picture several-megabyte log files where the most advanced pager is more and the only editor is vi, which breaks in ugly ways with even moderately sized files and which can't read more than a certain number of characters per line)
The admins at these companies have even at times given me excuses against these tools such as "that's not compatible with our security policy", yet the same environments they have perl installed!! While I realise that that's not Sun's fault directly, linux admins are more open to the idea of using these tools. Thus, when I've been a Sun user I've been unhappy with the experience, and when I'm a linux user I tend to like the experience.
Just in case anyone's tempted to write my opinions off as those only of an utterly naive linux user who couldn't get by in a slightly-unusual world: I do know a bit about the Solaris environment - I'm familiar with ksh, use set -o vi, and am fluent with vi.
I'm under the impression that once upon a time Sun was at the cutting edge of trying to improve the environment - competing against other unix providers to put killer tools in that made it stand out as excellent. Now I realise there were downsides to this (unix wars mentality, etc) - but there was something in that. These were the days when somebody would write/find a great new tool and just ship it.
This unix geek see his linux experiences as the bar against which everything else is measured and I suspect many people are in my shoes because that's what we grow up with. It's possible my experiences have just been an unlucky coincidence, but unlikely.
Guys - you need to win me back by doing things to ensure the Sun user environments I get exposed to are up to scratch.
Here's what I'd recommend to Sun by way of improving the situation:
- move to the version of 'more' derived from the 'less' codebase (if you don't already use that) and ship both by standard in the operating system (if you don't already - can't justify looking this up right atm)
- terminal definitions need to standardise so that vim and less work 'out of the box', *including syntax highlighting in vim!!*
- I'd recommend that people who go to Solaris courses, education programs or read the official books get exposure to the tools that developers love to use so they don't get paranoid at the prospect of exposing them to users
- make sure your evangelists match the target audience. In the two experiences I've had of Sun marketing people, they have not been from a cultural background to allow them to appreciate the difficulties I'm describing here. They'd rather talk about Sun One, or Java or current buzzwords, and they look a lot more comfortable talking about them with managers than developers. If you're serious about evangelising to developers you're going to have to do it properly
- distribute some sort of security policy for high-level secure environments that validates versions of significant tools that are important to users. eg: maybe you could have a program of forking vim every now and then and having a 'Sun-endorsed' version.
- get ahead of the rest by distributing a pager that's specifically designed to make it easy to bounce around huge log files without loading the whole thing into RAM (there may be something like this already - I don't know of it)
About getting back to their [Sun's] roots... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.
Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.
The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.
(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)
So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!
At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.
So, now we look at Sun.
All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.
Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**
**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...
Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.
SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.
The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us
Linux isn't the greatest (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a linux developer... and a FreeBSD, Solaris developer. The only 'major' OS I don't code for is Windows (intentionally).
Anyhow, to my point now, I must say the "Elitism" of Linux supporters is sometimes overwhelmingly sick. I've encountered people who refuse to believe that there's anything at all better than Linux, "Linux is great". I'm personally sick of it.
Sun has some great tools and some great developer networks. I don't use them much myself as I simply don't write programs which get down to the levels where OS differences become a major factor.
I for one am greatly looking forward to ZFS and DTRACE. For years I've been asking around in the linux community for something like dtrace, best responses I got was "Why would you want that? Use top" or "Profile your application" (like wtf??). I'm willing to bet that now that Sun as released DTRACE there's going to be a clambering to release a similar thing in linux.
To be fair, linux has also some lovely tools, valgrind is the one major tool which keeps me holding onto linux.... for now.
PLD.
Sun's strategy makes perfect sense.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yawn -- don't bother with this (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the same guy who wrote a pathetic review of a Sun Blade that the eds for some unknown reason thought was worthy of mention here [slashdot.org] some months ago. The guy is ill-informed and is not a Solaris user. Both his Sun-related articles mention his inability to get Solaris to perform and yet he blames it on Solaris; of course it would have nothing to do with his inexperience -- after all he is the author of the world-famous The Jem Report , The Internet's Best Computer Review Site (!!!), so he's obviously a guru.
And the ad for the "critically acclaimed" novel was cringe-worthy -- for some fun, read some of the comments from those that bought the novel.
I just hope the eds remember not to run stories from this site again.
Open Source vs Open Systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the old days, before RMS and ESR got into a fight over what free meant, and we just gave away our code because we thought it was cool what other people did with it, proprietary meant "you buy this, you're stuck with it". Open systems, whatever the status of their code base, were a response to that.
Write your code to an open API and it'll run, with some effort, anywhere that API was implemented. If you used a proprietary API, you had to either rewrite a lot of your code when you wanted to transport it, or create your own transportable API and port it to each platform. One of the reasons UNIX was so popular is that the API was abstract, distant from the implementation, so it served BOTH purposes well enough that everyone, Microsoft included, ended up with UNIX emulation of some kind or another.
But benefiting from an open system requires remaining aware of the open API and what's not open. And this gives a back door for proprietary interfaces to sneak in again. You can get yourself locked in to an API without intending to. It takes effort to fight that, and a lot of the open source community doesn't seem interested in spending that effort. Apart from the unnecessarily complex X11 toolkit situation, there's just too much code that depends on proprietary GCC features, or on specific extensions to open-source versions of open-systems tools.
So McNealy is quite justified in using proprietary in terms of interfaces and protocols, and there's a lot of open-source developers out there who ought to pay attention. The source isn't enough. If we have to pull things like "a ?: b" out of your code to get it running on other implementations of open systems, then your software isn't as "open" as you think it is.
Whether Solaris is actually as open, in this older sense, as Scott would like you to think it is... possibly not. Sun's played the 'stealth extensions' game themselves in the past. But that's a different matter. I'm only talking about the meaning of the word here.