Is Sun Turning against Linux and Red Hat? 542
An Elephant writes "Groklaw is reporting,
based on a ZDNet UK story, that Sun's strategy for survival in the near future is based on trying to equate Linux with Red Hat, and then attack Red Hat as too small to support enterprises. This seems strange -- Sun is selling a Linux distro itself (the Java Desktop System). As I write this, there's no mention of this on Sun's website -- neither confirmation nor denial. What's going on?"
Sounds like they are looking for the competition (Score:5, Informative)
I think they missed the point.
Wait a minute (Score:3, Informative)
They tried to make their own distro of Linux and that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I guess Sun just has to be more competitive and work harder to get support contracts away from redhat.
Ideologies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SUN, yawn (Score:5, Informative)
McNealy is known to keep a "decapitated penguin" on his desk...
Don't be sensationally unfair; it's the head from the penguin costume that he WORE the year before to declare his company's embrace of Linux.
SGI? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No surprise here... (Score:3, Informative)
IBM runs "Linux" advertisments on TV though.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Informative)
NFS, OpenOffice, GNOME?
Re:No surprise here... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't buy it, I grow it.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Intel. Read the 2.6.9-2 changelog. Tony Luck contributes, as does Ken Chen. You didn't mention SGI, but I'll mention them. sgi.com email addresses submit patches. HP? Sure, Bjorn Helgaas submits patches. Dell? Oh yeah, Dell hosts the MegaRaid development mailing list, and a few people from dell.com also submit patches. AMD? Take a look at the 2.4.27 chagelog. An AMD employee submitted a patch for an AMD network driver.
IBM is not the only corporation to submit patches to the Linux kernel.
Not Entirely True (Score:4, Informative)
>
SGI have contributed to numerous projects, and are only narrowly behind IBM in terms of how much they've put in. They'd be contributing more, but their Apache accelerator unit was shut down because the Apache group wouldn't take their patches. Fools that they are. (Apache, that is. Those were some damn good patches.)
SGI also ships the Altix platdorm and contributes to Linux' NUMA development, SMP development and numerous other projects. (You don't build 1024-way systems unless you're going to make it run a 1024-way OS.)
Novell's doing alright by OSS/GPL too... (Score:4, Informative)
ALERT: Karma Whore! (Score:5, Informative)
From May 14, 2004 nonetheless.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:turning linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Really? This is news. I was not aware that Red Hat had quit shipping:
Apache
OpenSSL
PHP
Mozilla
Because all of these use licenses which the FSF says on its web site are not compatible with the GPL.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
This is a true story about sun (Score:5, Informative)
No matter whatever you say they are going down. If they don't go I will put my effort to see that Sun is out of business.
That being said--why I am so pissed ?
There is one thing you can never do and get away in Enterprise computing--lie to your customer.
This is back in 1997/1998 when MSFT was not considered a enterprise level system. So we were happy running the latest E3500 and 4500 systems. Then one day the Memory problem started taking place. If there is any Sun hardware admins there they will probly remember the "J3200" error in the syslog just before the system crash.
Sun did not tell us that was a memory problem and took us through painful route of upgrading/patching/replacing components etc. . We trusted Sun and went with that.
Then I have found out they were going to major customers and signing out some kind of NDA where they will fix their server only at a condition the customer can not tell that to anyone.
So, I guess the 1.5M budget we had for Sun gear was not enough for Sun. After we found out ( BTW the sales guy's name was "Steve Introcaso" -- normally works in North East Division--one smooth talker, just hope that he is not in your account ) what was going on we called Sun and they again denied about it.
My job was on the line since I was the architect of the Stock Market Data Processing System. I have finally convinced our management with proper value proposition to start the migration from Sun to Linux since it was not possible for me to "trust" Sun anymore and IBM/HP was too much effor to port the systems.
It took over 5 years to get rid of Sun--but I am glad I did it.
Whatever you do--don't lie when you are dealing with a company's lifeline systems and who buys >1M worth of gears from you every year.
And not to mention about the Java BS they did ... but that's for another day.
Another problem: Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Re:turning linux? (Score:3, Informative)
I gotta say I felt the same way, but after quickly checking the size of that file, I decided that having a 256M avalanche of binary data inundate my monitor wouldn't be all that exciting
Re:What about Novell? (Score:4, Informative)
Not that Im disagreing with your basic point... Novell was its worst enemy in the 90s. Its stuff worked too well, was ignored and forgotten about. 3.11, NT 3.5, and 95 with their half assed networking abilities appeared better, and in many cases was good enough. But there back. Hopefully
Re:No surprise here... (Score:3, Informative)
Sun has had weird relationships with lots of open source projects that cut into their planned markets, ranging from X-windows to gcc, from their embracing of AT&T style UNIX over BSD style UNIX with the release of Solaris, to their on-again/off-again friendliness to open source work with Java that might remove their leadership in its planned development.
It certainly wouldn't shock me if they once again try to push new products and tools that allegedly run only on their proprietary hardware, only to find that basic services run much faster on the same hardware using one of the Linux distributions.
Re:yeah. (Score:1, Informative)
I think you're referring to disassociative identity disorder. Multiple personalities is not a symptom of schizophrenia.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:3, Informative)
NFS (Score:4, Informative)
Sun vs. Everybody (Score:5, Informative)
Now Sun is partnered with MS. That alone could kill Sun if it is not very careful. But MS is running scared, and could die before leveraging their partnership to destroy Sun.
Sun wants to equate Linux with Redhat. That might have worked a few years ago. Redhat is American; SuSE was German; Mandrake is French; TurboLinux is Asian; Lindows is playing a different game. Now SuSE is American, owned by Novell, and IBM is investing in it. Does Sun not realize that SuSE moved into the neighborhood? Redhat is attempting to emulate MS, and earning MS-like badwill, but there is an American alternative. Of course, SuSE has the similar problems in putting proprietary programs into its distribution. It is difficult to find a totally-free but commercially-viable American distribution, but that does not affect Sun's market.
IBM and Sun are still focused on powerful hardware. Google has demonstrated that many applications work well with a large server farm of low-power computers. IBM realizes that the only way to keep the hardware prices high is to commoditize software. Sun has great engineers, but their business strategies do not reflect today's market.
I like Sun, and wish them well. Dell is winning on hardware, MS is struggling to stay viable in software, and everybody else is wondering how to stay competitive. Sun does not have a good answer yet.
Re:Death of commercial Unix flavours... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:NFS (Score:3, Informative)
As for security, NFS is built on top of RPC, secure RPC and you have secured NFS. Sun's latest implementation of RPC does include a collection of security features.
I've heard (actually read...) a lot of rude noises about NFS on Linux.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:1, Informative)
SGI - XFS, bits related to Altix
Intel - ACPI, hot pluggable memory
AMD - CPU specific bits
Sun - autofs (?)
RedHat and Novell/Suse - duh
OSDL - coupla old geezers
Make no mistake, the kernel is going commercial big time.
Not only J3200 errors, E-Caché panics! (Score:1, Informative)
Patches and more patches, temperature and humidity control, and finally, an engineer from support services told us off-the-record that it was a hardware design mistake that made single bit flips in one of the two chips from the L2 caché. That flip were causing kernel panics, and obligated Sun to replace large amount of chips in some preferent clients. We replaced too, but it made me think.
Of course, we decided not to buy big Sun iron any more.
cheers
Re:Novell's doing alright by OSS/GPL too... (Score:4, Informative)
GPLing YaST was an often discussed topic for years at SUSE.
If you want to credit Novell for something then better tell that it's Novell's "fault" that SUSE offers ISO's of the SUSE Linux Personal Edition. Because that likely wouldn't have happened without Novell's influence.
Of course in the end it doesn't matter how the current state was reached as long as everyone is happy now.
Re:Anybody tried out Solaris 10 on x86? (Score:1, Informative)
You have Solaris 10 Express. Maybe it should have called S10 Beta. But that certainly wouldn't stop the mad conspiracy theories from arising here. Johnathon Schwartz's and other Sun blogs completely contradict this Zdnet article.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bnitz/20040709
GNU/Linux != Red Hat
Sun another SCO. (Score:3, Informative)
1) Getting paid by MS...
2) Betraying it's own open source/free software product.
3) Turning against Linux.
The only thing they haven't done is filed changes against Linux users.
Ah well.. we knew that Sun would turn out to be a bunch of assholes anyway. We've beat them for years and we'll just have to continue to do so.
GJC
Re:No surprise here... (Score:3, Informative)
HP is betting the shop on commodity based 64 bit computing in Itanium, Itanium II, etc.
IBM has Power5, Power6, etc. A very solid roadmap after years of unix neglect in the 90s. Although Power4 was a bit weak, Power5 looks great and Power6 will definitely be on schedule. What is Sun's latest roadmap schedule? I can't remember, they keep changing the roadmap...
Finally, Sun = Solaris. HP is "Itanium = Linux, HP-UX, or MS products". IBM is "AIX, or Linux, or whatever you want to run on our hardware...we won't stop you."
Itanium = Intel manufacturing. I prefer AMD, but either way both manufacturers have huge investments in numerous tiers of chip manufacture...they can get economies of scale. IBM saw this deficiency, and got new partners. X-Box, PS2, Ninentdo = PowerPC series. Same with Apple. THey've diversified their manufacturing lines.
Sun, on the other hand, now has to consolidate its own market share through a dependence upon Fujitsu now.
Make no mistake -- everything Sun does is about their hardware. And the market is commoditising itself, whether Sun wants to or not. Solaris is a good OS, but I wouldn't pick my hardware based on it. And the best thing is that whatever Solaris can do, the Open Source community can mimick (better) 2-4 years down the line. There is no compelling reason to be bleeding edge all the time, especially in corporate environments...
In short: I haven't seen Sun win an RFI with any company based on technical merits alone in a very very long time. Pricing discounts and enticements yes, but that eats into their bottom line ~alot~, and they can't afford it.
A Solaris kernel engineer's perspective (Score:4, Informative)
This guy's blog puts things nicely in perspective. Some excellent points.
Re:Some interesting weblog posts (Score:3, Informative)
build 63, and binary compatibility for drivers
is key to it: it allowed us to install a jukebox
controlled by Legato, even though Legato don't
support 10. They provide a user-space SCSI
driver for Solaris, and it just dropped into 10
and worked, even though it was from a CD that was
cut eighteen months ago.
Re:This is a true story about sun (Score:3, Informative)
I have seen more Sun parts failing in a month last year than I had in the previous seven years with Sun, HP, IBM, EMC and Compaq cumulated.
Luckily, I no longer have to deal with that crap anymore.
Re:No surprise here... (Score:3, Informative)