Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization 221
mytrip writes "In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time.
Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market.
Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's."
So what? (Score:2)
Honestly, does "market Capitalization" mean more than 700M in sales vs. 13B in sales?
Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
an estimation of the value of a business that is obtained by multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the current price of a share
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that. I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers? Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?
Really, I think it says more of the "investors" that they think a company with sales of 700M a year should be worth (in market capitalization terms) the same or more than a company with sales of 13Billion a year.
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They're both public...
Sun [sun.com]
Red Hat [redhat.com]
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
That is largely right, except for one detail: Red Hat is producing profits, but Sun recently posted a big loss, mostly due to a 1.45B impairment of goodwill charge. (In English: they revised their estimate of the value of some of the companies they've purchased, down 1.45B).
To answer the original thread poster's question: it's not how much you sell, it's how much your keep.
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[does] market capitalization really [say] more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers? Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth?
I think customers are a good way to predict what customers will do in the future, but sales volume is only a very small fraction of that equation. The people that really track customer behavior are investment analysts / non-technical financial people. And as far as stock traders being susceptible to hype, it isn't necessarily bad at all to "go with the flow", just be sure to jump ship in time if the only thing you are going on is hype.
But in reality, for as much as traders may be unpredictable and suscepti
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
It's almost as silly as judging a company by it's gross sales.
What you're looking for is PROFIT. Sun's profit was 88 million, or 11 cents per share in the last quarter (down 73%) while Red Hat's profit was 24 million, or 12 cents per share, up about 7%. Sun is forecasting that they will lose money over the next year, while Red Hat is forecasting (and analysts agree) that they will continue making money.
Sun still made more money than Red Hat, but even Sun agrees that's going to change.
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I think your confusing not making their forecasted amounts with losses
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I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers?
It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.
Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?
There are many ways of evaluating a business as a whole, some are subjective, e.g. something "only a technical p
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It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.
Dude, did you used to work for Dell?
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I am going to point you to the current financial meltdown of some of the biggest banks & trading houses in the US(World) as proof that a large number of "Investors" are choosing investments that have intrinsic value. Most of these "commoditiezed mor
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Shareholders have ousted several boards for favoring long term profit over the quarterly report, so it's not surprising that boards & CEO's are pushing more for the quick buck & less for the sustainability for that profit.
This is one of the problems that I see with publicly-traded companies in a free market. John Deere is a perfect example of this.
Deere use
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Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term.
As long as the currency, the fundamental measurement of value, is intrinsically unsound and the rules of the game are changed at whim there basically is no way to determine what investments have a long term profitability. Central banks inherently mismanage interest rates to generate demand that isn't real, leading to an eventual collapse of the kind we're currently seeing.
they generally won't go to zero
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Sun is still a power-player, there's no doubt about that, but looking the the business models of the two companies really makes me think.
Sun has largely focused their revenue streams around two things that seem counterintuitive to me: Profiting from licensing of a (albeit very successful) programming language, and selling deployments that include software that they've developed or purchased, open-sourced, and then re-proprietized on their own hardware. In other words, SUN sells products, and makes some
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Is there anyone who thinks that market cap is a good metric to judge a company's overall success by at this particular moment in time? Pretty much every stock has been hit and hit hard, and the degree to which the size of that hit has anything to do with the company itself is highly questionable. The relationship between stock price and a company's success is ephemeral in the best of times, but now?
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You know... The relevant part is not about how much you sell, but how much of a profit you make from those sales.
13B in sales won't help if you had 14B in expenditures over the same period.
The sum of Linux vendor capitalization (Score:5, Insightful)
If Linux is how much can be made free... (Score:5, Interesting)
Add to that the average wage of a software engineer times the number of man hours contributed to FlOSS, and you can quickly see how Microsoft is getting its butt kicked!
I love the new math!
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I love that this got modded Interesting.
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I'm thinking there's more to the decline in Microsoft's market cap between the peak of the dot-com bubble and today's apocalypse than just Linux.
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...and today's apocalypse
Who do you think created the apocalypse? :-)
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Thank you Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.
Re:Thank you Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally if I got to choose one of either all of Suns knowledge, experience, code and products or Redhats I'd for sure go with Sun.
Obviously the market works differently =P
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(differently = who is more likely to make money of their knowledge, experience, code and products :D)
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Corrected that for you.
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Or rather, how the stock market believes the rest of the stock markets sees the stocks potential to raise regardless of the companies ability to generate revenue, their knowledge, experience, code or products :D
Fixed that for us.
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Which is basically redundant considering the market's assessment of an organization's value at any given point in time is mankind's most reliable assessment of its future value. Your first post was fine as is.
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Which is basically redundant considering the market's assessment of an organization's value at any given point in time is mankind's most influential determinant of its future value. Your first post was fine as is.
Fixed that for you
Re:Thank you Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think the stock market is wrong, you can earn money.
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This only shows how open-source is a better economic model. Red Hat profits from their own work, in addition to the work of many others like IBM, SGI, HP, Oracle and Sun.
Sun, on the other hand, also has to develop hardware (curring edge hardware, BTW). Their operation is far more costly.
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Of course you didn't mention the key players - the early implementors of Linux. How many billions have they made?
I guess this "better economic model" doesn't apply to the risk-takers, just to the opportunists that feed on them.
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If you refuse to make a profit, you can't blame those who don't when they make one by offering useful services to a large community.
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I'm not blaming anyone. I'm simply saying whatever benefit there may be for that economic model it doesn't really apply to starting a project. Of course, I doubt that all the early implementors of Linux refused to make a profit.
Sun has always been very bad in business (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not that Sun would have done the wrong things. Their problem for the last 15 years has been that they have been over-careful of commitment into their own business. From business perspective they have been apathic at best, and I iterate the same I said in 90s already: I would not invest a penny into them.
They have not taken any steps to fix their real problems so far, so likely they will just keep sinking slowly until the company will be bought by someone who knows how to actually run companies. Perhaps
Re:Thank you Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.
When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.
Relative to what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.
When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.
Sun was expensive compared to what? Windows boxes? Linux boxes that came later? Sun became the huge company it was because they were far more affordable than what IBM and Digital was charging in the 80s, and everyone ran to them. It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.
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When Linux became viable, Sun was among the first to become aware that big apps like Oracle were being ported. It was a golden opportunity to come out with a Sun Linux and support it along with Solaris. It would have let them tap into smaller markets and crush Red Hat.
Instead they tried like hell to prop up their massively profitable Sparc platform. For smaller projects everybody went straight to Linux, or even Windows. Now... who in their right mind would buy Sparc hardware over HP or Dell servers runn
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actually HP or Dell servers running Solaris.
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It's not just price that puts people off sun, it's difficulty of use. There's all sorts of silly pointless things like why you have to put a 01 in front of mac addresses when configuring their ldap client to jumpstart stuff (apparently the 01 means "ipv4" or something, but after learning what it was, i figured it was too irrelevant to bother remembering what it was for), or how when you configure ldapclient it defaults to trying to do name lookups over ldap to look up the name of the ldap server (come on g
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I for one welcome our new Linux Overlords
Bad marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.
Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc. And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it. Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Yes, Sun has done some of these things, but not in a coherent way, and certainly not in a simple way. Things are just too hard to go through Sun.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.
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Thing is, they shouldve killed solaris and become a full fledged Linux or BSD shop with enormous expertiese on Unix and great services built on open source java. I think they probably could still pull it of, albeit with an enormous ammount of pain.
They misread the game and didnt wanna get their feet cold: this is what happened to them.
Kind of whats going to happen to microsoft and what is happening to music and movie distributors.
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I think you're seriously undervaluing Solaris. Killing it wouldn't be doing anyone any favors.
Re:Bad marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
Read only ZFS has been in OSX since 10.5, full blown ZFS is in OSX Snow Leopard as well as various flavors of FreeBSD. It will go into Linux if/when the kernel licensing issues can be overcome, it's already available via FUSE. ZFS is also used in several storage appliances by Sun and others.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it.
What is so difficult to understand? Sun divisions have contributed more than 1/2 of the OpenSource code out there (OpenOffice, Java, VirtualBox, MySQL, OpenSolaris...) Sun is a systems company. That code is out there so the world doesn't end up locked into systems built around Microsoft and Wintel fat clients. Where I think Sun could improve is in selling support and integration services for RedHat, OSX other *nixes. Sun definitely has the expertise and some Sun employees have expertise in enough *nix variants that they won't paint you into a corner. In fact, anyone who has ever been involved with porting from Linux to Solaris will tell you that step #1 is improve the quality of the code, Solaris/Forte doesn't let coders get away with the kind of sloppiness that gcc/Linux does.
Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Have you been watching Nexenta or OpenSolaris 2008.11? This X86/desktop "usability" gap has closed significantly and if you're using Linux for a server, you really need to look at OpenSolaris, ZFS admin is far easier than anything you'll find on RHEL, svcadm takes the randomness out of system services and dtrace is awesome for diagnosing issues in production systems.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.
I agree wholeheartedly!
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I agree. Anyway, it's been quite a while since market capitalization has been a good comparison of companies, particularly in the tech sector and especially with the current chaotic market. I guess that market cap is good for bragging rights, you know, "Ha, ha, we're bigger than you," otherwise, it's a minor component of many others that we use to compare companies.
A relatively unimportant event (Score:5, Insightful)
its all about speculation... (Score:2)
Ever known a person with a good idea that didn't follow through on making it into something?
It all comes down to predicting what customers are going to do. Unfortunately good talent, technology, and the drive to
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You are correct about it not necessarily being about technical advances, but who cares? Why are technical advances so important? Did Ubuntu have some great technical advances that caused it to gain in popularity? Perhaps... but I don't think that's why most people like it, or at the very last, many of the people who use it probably can't point to any technical advance as a reason for why they use it. Market cap is a measure of the company's perceived worth, and in that sense, surpassing Sun is significant i
Re:A relatively unimportant event (Score:4, Informative)
I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history).
It's symbolic because Sun was one of the leaders of the big change that occurred at the beginning of the microcomputer era, when Unix started to replace the old mainframe OSs. And it's symbolic because Sun is the last major player to consider Unix part of its core strategy. Other Unix vendors have become insignificant (SGI, SCO), disappeared, or changed their emphasis to Linux and Windows (IBM, HP).
Also, if you want to run a supported, commercial Unix on commodity hardware, Solaris is really your only option. Which is why both HP and Dell offer Solaris preinstalled. Though I don't suppose they sell a lot of those systems.
As a benchmark of the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But symbols and benchmarks are different things.
This may all be a big yawn to somebody whose career started after Linux began to take over. But to those of us who spent most of our professional lives working with Unix (I started in the early 70s, before Unix was even available commercially; I've worked for 5 different Unix vendors, including Sun) it's as big a symbol as the takeoff of a certain helicopter on Tuesday.
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Further evidence... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that marketing trumps technology. Sun has some incredible tech and even delivers x86 servers at highly competitive prices. Yet because Sun's marketing sucks worse than a black hole, generating new customers is a huge issue for them. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of their business is still through customer reps with little attention paid to the market as a whole.
I personally think that Sun could be successful in quite a few areas of the market. Not the least of which is as a serious competitor to Dell's server business. But first, Sun has to figure out how to communicate with the average customer. Giving their software complex prefixes like "Sun Java System", branding everything with "SPARC" even when it isn't SPARC, changing their market ticker to JAVA, and giving up on new markets before they've made inroads aren't exactly painting Sun in a positive light.
Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE.
Re:Further evidence... (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, but it's not only marketing. Sun has apparently decided to go into the support and commodity hardware market. In commodity hardware, margins are razor thin, so they really have to distinguish themselves. In my recent experiences with Sun x86 systems, quality has been something of a problem. They say it was a temporary issue with one of their plants in Mexico, but when we ordered a ton of x86 boxes about a year ago, it took much longer than it should have to get to us, and the failure rate was unusually high.
Also, when they released the x4100 Mk2, they claimed it was virtually identical to the Mk1, and there would be no issues. However, it turns out they made some fairly significant changes such as changing the vendor of the on-board network cards to one that the OS image we were using at the time had no support for. It also had a different type of PCI port (PCIe versus PCIx, IIRC), which meant all of the extra NICs we had lying around were suddenly useless. Had they told us of these changes, it would have been no problem. Instead, they just told us our order was being changed to the "virtually identical" Mk2, and we had to scramble when we got them. Not great customer support there. After that incident, we actually stopped using Sun for x86 hardware entirely.
Going back to marketing though, they are really pushing this "Open Systems" thing, which is nice and all, but their salespeople don;t know how to sell it. At a recent presentation, the Sun sales guy was talking up Open Systems, and a member of the audience asked, "If everything is open and interchangeable, why shouldn't I just use your free open source software and go buy a cheaper system from Dell? What is the advantage of your box, if it's commodity like the rest? Why should I buy from you?", and the sales guy had no answer for him! He actually stumbled over his words for about 30 seconds, at one point actually saying there was "no reason" before one of his colleagues finally pipes up with something about "end to end support".
Maybe they need to be touting the end to end support first, and the open systems stuff second. Suits tend to like open source because it's a lot cheaper, not because they're big on the philosophy, so stop pushing the "open source" thing so hard when the open source bit is the part you're giving away for free. Market the entire platform as an end-to-end solution, and throw in the open source part as an aside. Sun's marketing team doesn't seem to get that.
Anyway, that was a bit long-winded, but the point is that Open Source isn't going to save Sun by itself. They have more problems, and I see them surviving as a much smaller and less interesting company than they are today if they stick to the path they're currently on.
End-to-End solutions are Sun's real selling points (Score:3, Insightful)
But if Sun doesn't even know wha
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I should hang out there more often
obvious sarcasm?
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The market that is left in SAP type of stuff. Software that allows a company to become more competitive. There's more new markets, but I'm too old t
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Sun clinges to solaris like if it was a tecnical miracle and hey, look at linux, they aint that much different and that counts at the market.
I think this is exactly why Sun is having trouble.. They are so horrible at marketing their stuff everyone thinks it's just like Dell but different, or just like Linux but different. I hate to say it, but the only way to show Solaris's value is going to be getting dirty with Linux, and that isn't going to be very popular in some crowds. Look at Apple's Mac/PC ads for instance. Same thing there, everyone thought (thinks?) Apple hardware was just the same as Dells but more expensive, and that OS X was Wi
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That's not true. For example, when I go to Sun's URL for the Sun Fire T5240 [sun.com] and click through to the section to purchase a server, you first see the MSRP. However, after I login on the account window to the right, the price of the server now shows my corporate discount. Of course, this assumes you have an account that is linked with a corporate discount in the first place, but that seems like a fairly obvious assumption to me.
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With the current way Sun does business hardware wise it cannot compete with Dell directly. Sun sells higher end hardware and Dell sells lower end servers very cheap. You can buy two Dell servers loaded with the same memory and SCSI drives instead of SATA drives, with 3 years support for what a single Sun server would cost you. I have several JBoss clusters and I just throw Dell PE1950s at them. If one crators, the rest of the cluster just hums along. Sun competes with HP, IBM, and the like. They DO
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For quite some time, Sun was undercutting Dell on AMD64 servers. I have been told that you can still get the servers cheaper if you have a rep. The problem is that Sun gave up on the rest of the market after only a short push. (You might remember the "rhymes with hell" ads here on Slashdot.) And dealing with a central sales rep is a pain and a half when any segment of a large company can order a server through Dell.com.
So I'm not surprised that you think Sun doesn't compete with Dell. As I said, they have a
Re:Further evidence... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE."
Schwartz is part of the problem at Sun. When McNealy named Schwartz as his successor, a collective "huh?" was heard all over the tech world.
Schwartz's gamble seems to be "give every piece of software away, and sell commodity hardware".
This is, in a word, foolish. IBM doesn't give everything away. Nor does HP, or Apple. They carefully balance their open source obligations against the need for exclusivity in some areas. Sun should be trying to emulate Apple in many ways (and IBM in some others), but instead, is trying to remake itself into a Red Hat that sells cheap X86 hardware, and this is a recipe for doom.
Don't give that much credit. (Score:5, Interesting)
SUN's market was traditionally on High End equipment. Standard PC hardware has been getting to the Good enough category, and replaceing the need for the high end stuff. Even if the high end stuff today is that much more high end, we are reaching a point where we need less high end equipment.
the 80's almost every major university had its own super computer. 90's they had a mainframe, 2000's they have high end microcomputer based servers.
SUN product line has been between mainframe and microcomputers. Now their new stuff is either to much for what people need to too expensive for what you get.
Linux growth has always been fasted with the Unix Corps who are upgrading to a new network, and it is way cheaper for a Unix corporation to switch to Linux (or Old Unix to New Unix) then to Windows. (Windows to Linux costs a lot more).
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we are reaching a point where we need less high end equipment
I think it is more like people / businesses no longer need so much specialized equipment as your average cheap PC can do almost anything, and what was once very specialized hardware is very efficient software that runs on consumer grade hardware. Wasn't sure if that is what you meant, but that is the impression I have gotten also.
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I would stand by good enough. SUN hardware does have some really nice high end features that standard PC hardware doesn't have and massive scalability too. However these are features that people don't need anymore or the cost of implementing these features are much more expensive then dealing with a PC workaround.
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It really depends on your workloads. I see SPARC boxes running rings around x86 boxes the same price range on highly parallel workloads.
Your opinion is worth squat. (Score:3, Insightful)
Can any MS based servers be configured to divide resources on "virtual" machines before the operating system is booted?
And then each one of those virtual machines can run a couple of dozen instances of a operating system?
And then can you assign on the fly CPUs, memory or I/O cards to any of your initial virtual machines?
Can actually any Linux machines do this?
You guys talk about desktops like if getting the latest version of Gnome working was the coolest thing regarding technology. That is not Sun's beef, S
It might be interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
..if Redhat sold netbooks, laptops and desktops and servers pre loaded with linux that "just worked", all of it, no hardware gotchas anyplace.
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Well, ya (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm,. I know Dell and Redhat aren't in the same business. The article was more about Sun and Redhat. Sun sells software, services and hardware. Redhat only sells two of those things so far. That's why I thought it might be interesting if they took a crack at opening up the last leg of that tripod. I *do* know I would be more inclined to get hardware from Redhat knowing it just worked with Linux than getting a similar situation from Dell or Sun. Any place that advertises that they recommend Vista on the top
Market cap is speculative bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone with a brain (ok, it takes perhaps a bit more than just half) knows that the stock market, as an entity, is an idiot.
There, I said it. I expect to be modded down by Linux fanboys (which is NOT the same as intelligent Linux users, mind you. I like to think I belong to the latter).
Wait wait (Score:2)
Wasn't Sun in trouble a few months ago, where their market cap was less than book value? I.e. the market was sure Sun was going to waste whatever resources they had.
Wonderful.... (Score:2)
In fact, my biggest grip with RedHat is that they always seem 2-3 revisions behind everyone else. I mean, come on! I wonder exactly what it is they are doing with all that money?
Finally (Score:3, Funny)
2009, the year of the linux desktop!
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No. 2009, the year when the sun darkened, and darkness descended.
I call bullshit - at least in part! (Score:2)
Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market.
According to whom? FUD!!!
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So? (Score:2)
The realms of each company are not comparable.
Sun's bread and butter has been with the sector of the economy that has being hit the worst by the financial meltdown: banks.
If Sun can hang on long enough for the Financial industry to be sorted out, they will be back because they have technical offerings that cheap hardware manufacturers and Linux providers can only dream about (ZFS, dtrace, SMF, self healing, M series, honestly, this is cool stuff that actually have the potential to save tons of money to big
Great Joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's.
Bwwwwwwahahahahahahaha. "Likely" if you are a Jonathan Schwartz sock puppet account. Unlikely if you've followed Sun's dismal performance [yahoo.com] for any length of time.
Sun's missteps over the year (Score:3, Informative)
First - Sun had a UNIX for x86 in 1992-1993 which was superior to Linux at the time. This is not hindsight being 20-20, my manager complained to me in 1997 (we had Solaris x86 dekstops) how Sun was screwing up Solaris x86. Red Hat only got things like a decent kernel crash dump put in recently - Sun really messed this up.
Secondly - too slow to embrace "open source". Red Hat did and now their market cap is about to surpass the company that did not (soon enough anyhow).
Thirdly - how necessary was dumping the Berkeley-like SunOS for the System V-like Solaris? I personally think they put too much of an effort into this, although opinions may vary.
I watched SGI get killed in the mid-1990s. People began doing low-end graphics stuff on Macs or even Windows, and suddenly SGI only became a company for the high-end. It was easy to see that this was the future for Sun. Now Wall Street has collapsed, and the big market Sun had has dried up. And Wall Street has gone from an environment where in 2001 Linux was just a test project, to where some companies are now almost all Linux on the UNIX front, and are looking to dump their "legacy" Sun stuff. It didn't have to be this way.
I first encountered Sun in the late 1980s and until recently I still had a lot of love for them. Red Hat's lack of things like a decent kernel crash dump bugged me. But now Red Hat really does have almost all of the stuff that a critical production server needs. Windows-heavy shops like Suse a lot. I know a lot of UNIX admins and shops that develop for UNIX, including in the traditional financial companies - everywhere the new machines coming in are Linux, and a lot of places are trying to phase their Suns out. I think metaphors of a Sun set are becoming appropriate. Sun screwed up x86 and they screwed up "open source" and now Solaris is going to be relegated to the dustbin that Ultrix and HP-UX are in. If you search for admin jobs on Craigslist, Solaris doesn't even have much of a lead on AIX. With Red Hat now having journaling filing systems, virtualization, decent kernel crash dumps, production Oracle instances that run as well (or better) than on Solaris, high availability and so on and so forth, I can think of very little that Sparc's running Solaris have that a cheaper x86-64 running Red Hat doesn't have.
Re:frist psot (Score:5, Funny)
A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon.
They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned.
In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil.
In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.
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Did You Know? After maintaining a vow of silence for almost 7 years, Red Hat Linux founder Marc Ewing now freely admits that he named Red Hat Linux after Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's trademark red New York Yankees baseball cap.
Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the same passion for low-level system programming.
Durst collaborated with Ewing on the first preview beta of Red Hat Linux before the dem
Re:frist psot (Score:5, Funny)
A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon. They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned. In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil. In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.
Wow! The Readers Digest version of Slashdot!
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Slashdot in a nutshell? Or maybe not. [slashdot.org]
I'd like to see what they'd put on the cover.
Re:Riiiight . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Thoroughly unlikely. Sun would be bought out long before they needed to declare bankruptcy. Their star may not be in ascension, but the company has real value.
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Then you're blind on many levels, companies like Sun have enough technology that you've never even heard of (because they aren't selling it for various reasons) that they would get picked apart by various organizations taking the pieces they want. Then there is all the known technology they have produced and value in their products. If you think their products don't have any value, you A) Haven't been in the business of dealing with servers very long and also B) are blind, but I already said that.
Layoffs
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Re:Riiiight . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
First, in a friendly way ... nobody gives a rat about workstation class machines. Any fool can dump Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows, BSD, OpenSolaris, or whatever, and google up enough support/fun tools to get the job done and post on /. on most any cheap-ass 2 year disposable wintel capable machine.
So, on server class machines... number 1 reason: Support contracts.
Sun is one stop shopping; hardware and software by the folks that make it. Dell also supports RH linux through their customer care center, and I'll assume that HP/IBM do as well, but they are not RedHat, they are $vendor with RH knowledge and expertise. Thats a separate subscription to get RedHat support and you then get the RHNetwork portals in addition to standard phone support. So you pay twice (1 for $vendor and 1 for RH), and it ain't cheap as Sun's.
Number 2 reason: Reliability.
SPARCs just don't die. When they do, its very pretty of course, but it just doesn't happen as often as Intel/AMD architectures do.
Also, Suns do not often have the compatibility problems that Intel/AMD arch's have. By compatibility, I mean the mobo + raid + firmware + kernel version + PCIx firmware + BMC version = "unsupported" type compatibility.
Fact is, I've been admin on Sun's for nearly 15 years, been through the really bad 5/7 releases and lots of other SUN 'badtimes'. hey are nothing like the hassles I have to go through daily with AMD/Intel arch's. I'm in a 4:1 Sun:Intel/AMD shop, and have a documented (ticketing system) 5:1 Intel/AMD:SUN hardware problem ratio.
Yes, my alias is 'sun.jedi', I've worked on Sun's a long time. This was not intended as a 'fanboy' post. I'm a beer/vacation fanboy before I'm a SUN fanboy.
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Coolthreads are great for multi threaded apps and processes. They are really horrible for linear processes. You can see 1 of 32 threads at 100% usage, and 31 of 32 doing squat.
If you lost time/performance by switching to a Coolthread box, it's because of the linear apps/processes the sun4u SPARCs would chew through in no time.
I forgotten the exact spec but it was T... Not sure what what number was.
T1000 or T2000. Until you 'uname' it. Then it's a T200.
It can also be referred to as the sun4v platform as opposed to the SPARC IIIi sun4u.
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mashup?! *sigh*
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> The market is clearly choosing Linux over OpenSolaris. One way to combat that would be
> to make OpenSolaris GPL3. It would then attract open source developers...
OpenSolaris is already Free Software. I see no reason to believe that such a license change would attract more developers.
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The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, which means that lots of free software code can't be used to improve OpenSolaris.
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And in 2005, while I was working for them, SGI declared bankruptcy. They made some phenomenally poor decisions both from a technology and a business point of view and they paid for it. Having been great once is not the same as being great. That said, they appear to be executing a very impressive turn-around, and part of me wishes I'd never left. Hopefully the economic down turn doesn't kill them just as they are digging out of their hole.