Sun Microsystems, SuSE Link Up To Sell Linux

ChilyWily writes "Reuters is reporting that Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to resell and support closely held German software firm SuSE's version of the Linux operating system, the leading variant in Europe, the companies said on Friday. This agreement follows a similar one in May between Sun and Red Hat Inc. While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?"

it never too late

[McAddress]

to go to linux. however, sun is making a big mistake. if they are not marketing solaris, they are losing their main product. why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz? for much less. if linux takes off, it will not only destroy microsoft, but there will also be some friendly fire deaths involved as well.

cheap?

[broeman]

smells like a cheap-scate version of their original plans, but then again it could let them to be more familiar with Linux and thereby be prepared to create their own distribution later on (and discard their own *nixes).

Re:It's about time...

[melete]

no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation.

Not neccesarily. In the unlikely event that SCO were to win their case, Sun would be distributing any tainted parts of Linux without a valid license from the original copyright holder of the tainted code. For SCO to win, the GPL has to be invalidated, at least in a limited sense, which will leave everyone, including SCO and Sun, scrambling for legal cover.

Re:It's about time...

[Curtman]

"no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation"

Thats fine as long as they are fee and clear to distribute it under the GPL, you and I are free and clear by proxy.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

They market linux on their low-end machines, not on their high end machines (yes a 4 chip machine is low end in these waters). Their market is different than the one you're talking about.

Sun already lost the low-end market. They're trying to buffer their high end market by saying "we too can interact with that other OS, no need to change your high-end just to get linux compatibility"

Re:Let the Sun Bashing commence

[BFKrew]

My guess is that it's Java...

Re:it never too late

[epiphani]

There will always be a market for Sun boxes - of all the higher-end server machines that have been out there, sun has outlived most. They're now the defacto non-intel platform in the server arena. From my experience, sun hardware is the first platform out there that you'll run into if you cut out apple and i386 hardware.

Plus, Sun is much more than just a hardware/OS company. They're diversifying - thats good. They probably see the threat that linux/open source represents to their sun/solaris product lines, and are moving to embrace it, so they can have a peice of the linux pie when it starts eating into their solaris cashflow.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying the ground is the first thing you'll crash a plane into, if you cut out the oceans and mountains.

What's the point?

[Trurl's Machine]

OK guys - I know that questions like this most often are modded down as "flamebait" or "troll", but I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation. Mod me down if you please, but also mod up an answer that would provide an insightful, informative and interesting explanation. I mean, I understand it for the early 1990's. When "Jurassic Park" was a big hit at the movies, the sitiuation was pretty obvious - you had these single-user, single-tasking OS'es like Windows 3.11 or MacOS 7 on one hand, and those powerful Unix boxen on the other hand. It was obvious, that you need a special dedicated machine to run high-end graphics tasks and another machine just to read the MS Office documents or play Doom. But now - what is the freakin' point, if you can run MS Office and all the latest games on a high-end personal computer (be it the PowerMac G5 or some x86 machine) and ALSO have your favorite Unix flavor running on it like charm? Where is the market niche for a workstation incompatible with the majority of commercial software?

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, I'd rather have SuSE owned by a German company these days than be owned by a U.S. company that could then be influenced by the U.S. courts, and/or U.S. Congress.

Bright sun

[G3ckoG33k]

"I wonder if this is too late for Sun"

Waddya mean?

* They have StarOffice, based on the GPL'd OpenOffice; they have a great future.
*Java (that pesky little language) was doomed too but still hangs around, much like Basic, Pascal and Visual Basic
*Solaris still has an unbeaten reputation for carrier grade quality in telecom compared to Linux, yet...
*They have their own hardware too, even if Opterons...

SUN is better than its reputation here, I believe.

Re:it never too late

[Curtman]

I think that with GNU/Linux being so portable, there is a chance we might be able to do away with manufacturers locking us in to an architecture. I for one would like to see hardware compete based on cost/efficiency, rather than the manufacturers operating system. It forces Sun to be more competitive if they are going to remain a hardware vendor, and the death of Solaris might free up a lot of resources that could be in hardware R&D. Having Linux as a supported platform also provides us the ability to do real world benchmark results. A comparison of the same code running on different hardware should be more useful than having numbers to compare from Windows vs Solaris vs Mac OS vs Linux vs BSD would anyhow. As long as we don't limit their ability to change the hardware without breaking compatibility we probably don't need Solaris around anyhow.

Why hit Sun?

[junkgoof]

Sun does some great stuff, and they have great support, but they can't decided what to do in terms of business. x86, linux, CDE, solaris, SCO-meddling, java...
Sun tries so hard to damage M$ that they hurt themselves, their friends, and their clients.
That said I'm a Solaris admin, and I like Sun hardware and software in spite of the Applesque pricing (yes that HD is $400, yes it is physically identical to the $80 PC drive, no you can't get the mounting bracket separately).

Re:What's the point?

[bobintetley]

One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components? Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

so they can have a peice of the linux pie when it starts eating into their solaris cashflow.

When it starts?!?!? What, 2 years ago? We started moving into x86/Linux for high end commercial servers the moment the economy started to go south and we had to cut costs.

There's still a definite market for SUN, and it's still my preferable server platform - but it's losing out on price, and the increasingly high quality solutions available with Linux from the likes of IBM.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[n3rd]

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002

There is no mention of this in the article you posted.

The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph [yahoo.com]. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system.

Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?

They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.

The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance

Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.

In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.

You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.

or the "TPC-C benchmark"

Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.

Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.

Until Sun is unseated as #1 in the UNIX server market [sun.com] (as reported by Gartner) and has less than it's 6.6 billion in the bank [yahoo.com] along with 13 billion in total assets I don't think Sun is too concerned.

Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.

Re:What's the point?

[I_am_the_man]

...running almost 24 hours a day...

You proved his point right there. *Almost* is something that someone buying Sun does not want to consider. Almost is not good enough.

You people have really missed the point.

[EoRaptor]

1. Sun offers 'big name' support contract for Linux.

2. Fortune 1000 companies require this type of backing on any new 'deployment'.

3. Sun now has an 'in' for their sales and support team.

4. Eventually, the solution to further growth will be something linux is 'unable' to do.

5. Experience with Sun, means Solaris is a natural upgrade choice.

6. Profit!

Sun doesn't care at all, they'd support windows if they could figure out some way to convince people that Solaris was the natural upgrade path from that. Linux will always have the 'hobby' stigma attached (mainly becuase Sun will always be whispering in the right ears. After all, they have access.) and thus Solaris is an easy sell, along with the dedicated, lock in hardware for it. Sun can't lose, even if they cna't upsell the client, they have still made a truckload of money on the support contract.

Grow up everyone, Sun isn't run by technologists, and doesn't give alick about Linux (or Solaris for that matter). What they want is money, and this is a means to that end. It may align with some peoples goals to promote Linux, but don't get confused about what Sun is really doing.

Re:Astonishing

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this sort of thing has happened at Sun before, it's an astonishing admission of defeat, in my books.

And by your logic IBM admitted defeat by offering Linux (as opposed to AIX). Same with HP and HP-UX.

It's too bad your emotional biases get in the way of a logical argument.

Re:Astonishing

[Decaff]

"Given the way Java is going nowadays"...
Java is the most widely used programming language and is still growing at an amazing rate. Sun sell licences for enterprise java and make a lot of money doing it.

Sun have always used an interesting strategy to open up markets for their products and services. They promote open standards, and even donate technologies to the IT community (such as NFS). Sun virtually invented the idea of the desktop Workstation. The idea being that the bigger the market for open standards, Unix, Java whatever, the bigger portion Sun can take. The more people use Linux, the bigger the Unix-ish market is a whole, and that benefits sun. There will be more users who could want to migrate to a more enterprise-level Unix version.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that? Plus, does the Debian group offer support for their product in the corporate sense of the word? I don't think so. Your average CIO/CEO etc. is not going to be happy knowing that any problems with their IT infrastructure will be handled by some guy on a mailing list from some other country. This scenario is not at all attractive to the corporate big-wigs that run companies.

is McNealy bipolar or what??

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with this "now I support it...now I oppose it" crap? Here's another article from the other day where he warns companies against using Linux or open source software:

McNealy: Don't touch Linux without legal guarantees [infoconomy.com]

In this article he says he supports Linux but also warns companies agains using it. Can someone explain his strategy to me?

Re:Um No

[ickoonite]

This is a bit OT, and I'm sure it's been said before, but do the 80 lines matter? That SCO distributed and continues to distribue Linux from its FTP servers under the GPL licence means that its threats are at the very least a waste of court time.

iqu

Re:it never too late

[__past__]

And you know how linux is making leaps and bounds ? take a look at some of the more recent code that has been put into the kernel, and in userland. Sun is a major contributor.

Not only the Linux kernel. Sun is who came up with NFS and PAM, they are major contributors in the Gnome project, they open-sourced Star/OpenOffice, they are an important part of the DocBook community, they invented the Morphic GUI now used in Squeak for the Self language, employ several hacker legends like Richard Gabriel, Guy Steele or Bill Joy (well, if you want to call that employment) etc, etc.

I mean, this is slashdot. We should not forget that, all objective topics aside, Sun is just one heck of a cool company! If only they would get rid of that annoying Scott McNealy...

Re:it never too late

[anthonyrcalgary]

They've got a few hundred Ultra 5's at uni. I don't know how old they are. 8 years? Something like that. They never quit. 8 months of the year they're in near constant use by idiots, and I've only seen a handful need attention in my time there. When they were built you couldn't get x86 hardware that solid. Now you can, but you won't be saving a lot of money, and the x86 systems don't scale nearly as well.

The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.

Linux gets better every day, but it's stupid to assume it can do everything just as well as the big iron, especially when it's often paired with inferior hardware.

Re:Too late for Sun?

[Biolo]

I really wish I could say more about this, but contracts kind of restrict me. What I can say is that Sun really are putting their money where their mouth is when they say quality is their number one priority. You saw it with the Broadcom chip incident, where they did the right thing and stopped shipments, even though it hurt the bottom line. That is just one incident that got widespread attention. Right now, more so than ever before, they are taking no risks that a customer will get a product that doesn't work just right when it gets installed in their server room. You've got to admire that sort of attitude, especially in this financial climate.

Bombproof computing, they are really making it their goal -although having just come back from watching Terminator 3 I'm no longer sure thats a good thing! :-) . You have to wonder how many other vendors, when faced with something like the Broadcom thing, either 1) don't notice it, 2) notice it but pretended they didn't, or 3) did the right thing even though it hurt them.

As for the holding onto Solaris thing, you can understand that. Solaris is and was a really great product. Having used AIX in a production environment I can understand why IBM aren't so bothered about loosing it to Linux. Given a choice I'd certainly pick Linux. When it comes to Solaris though, it's still not so clear cut, I'd go for Linux on the desktop because that's what everyone is targetting, but I would be sorely tempted for Solaris on the server, and it's a shoe in on the SPARC platform. If you truly believe in your product, like Sun does, it's much more difficult to accept that there may be a real alternative. Part of the problem is that Linux isn't (yet) a real alternative across Suns product range. SGI's Altix scales Linux to 64 processors, but that's the high end limit for now, until Linux gets to being capable of running on the top of the line Sun kit they can't fully commit to it, and by this I mean 128 CPU's, and be capable of handling 256 cores (coming soon(tm)). You've got to look at Suns selling point ever since it was started, Solaris from the lowliest workstation to the highest end servers. Your developers build and compile and test on the low end and deploy straight onto the highest end. Binary compatibility, surprisingly compelling, and Solaris still does this better than Linux, especially across OS/kernel versions.

That said if it was me who made those decisions I'd be sponsoring a major push to get Linux running on the SPARC platform, after all Solaris doesn't really make much money for Sun by itself but its SPARC hardware certainly does, and who cares if the customer runs Linux on Sparc or Solaris on Sparc, as long as they chose Sparc.

Disclaimer: I work for Sun, so obviously I'm biased, and none of the above statements are sanctioned by Sun in any way.

Re:Nice Microsoft advertisement

[spitzak]

No, unfortunatly any such "license" immediatly makes it illegal to sell (or give away) a copy of Linux containing the code covered by the license. This is because it violates the GPL that covers the rest of Linux.

The only way for this license to have some value is for SCO to identify what part of Linux it covers, and for that part to be a module or a user-level program or library (such licensed properties are allowed to be added to a Linux distributionj). SCO is definately claiming the exact opposite.

Re:I call bullshit

[maitas]

Well... actually the Software department has their biggest R+D headcount (even more than Solaris and SPARC conbined), something like 5000 souls...