In an open letter to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a group of users has called for the company to make Solaris 9 available on the lion’s share of computers based on the Intel architecture. The letter, published as an ad in the San Jose Mercury News and titled “Shame on you, Scott“, is the latest move in an eight-month war of words between Sun and a vocal contingent of its users. The spat kicked off in January when the software maker said it would put its next operating system, Solaris 9, on indefinite hold for the x86 architecture. Read more at News.com.
Sun Draws Heat Over Solaris Roadblock
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
That add is weird. People who want to develop for Solaris can buy pretty cheap sun boxes either the Sun blade or if they want http://www.ebay.com has no shortage of inexpensive Suns. Solaris x86 was never a terribly good product; the add really doesn’t say much of anything.
Frankly I don’t understand what the point is of Solaris on anything but expensive hardware. The advantages of Solaris are in areas like reliability and clustering not in anything you are likely to see in a $1000 PC.
I know you want comments like this sent directly to you, if sent at all, but this needs to be said publicly.
You need to stop presenting others’ stories as your own. You take another author’s headline, put a “by Eugenia” byline under it, quote the first paragraph of the story without italics or any commentary of your own beyond “read more at…”
You should attribute stories such as these in stronger terms like putting the source in the headline like Linux Today does (ie: “News.com: Sun Draws Heat Over Solaris Roadblock” ) and/or change the byline to something approprate when you are adding no real content or commentary of your own.
This story isn’t “by” you. It is by some guy named Robert Lemos. Treat him with some respect please.
The advantages of Solaris are in areas like reliability and clustering not in anything you are likely to see in a $1000 PC.
What makes PCs unreliable, heh? Normally it is cheap parts. Without cheap parts, it would still be cheaper than a Sun. As if a Sun doesn’t suit you, but you like Solaris… well 🙂
I neeeded a Solaris environment (like the one at school) to develop for. Was I supposed to buy an UltraSPARC just for the priviledge of doing so? Solaris 8 x86 runs great under VMWare on my P4 (almost as fast as the UltraSPARCs at school) and allows me to run Solaris on a laptop when I’m on the road.
Well, if you read the messageboard a little more closely, you can also interpret it as being “posted by” Eugenia – doesn’t mean she wrote it, nor is she implying that she did. It’s just the way the board is set up.
I don’t think he is actually trying to say that Eugenia is taking credit, just that the way things are posted makes it look that way too much. To which I agree really, would be really nice if it could be made more clear.
What makes PCs unreliable, heh? Normally it is cheap parts. Without cheap parts, it would still be cheaper than a Sun. As if a Sun doesn’t suit you, but you like Solaris… well 🙂
Certainly you can make a PC more reliable with expensive parts. OTOH there are structural issues that can’t be solved by using better quality and redundency. For example the Intel chip supports the following run levels:
0 – hardware
1 – drivers (not used in the same sense as NT)
2 – kernal
3 – program
What that means is that buggy hardware, that is any board which has a problem can introduce any problem it wants. Any piece of hardware attached to the system can write to any part of memory, take as much CPU time as it wants, etc… That’s a structural flaw which means that every PC can only be as reliable as the worst piece of hardware physically attached to it. Similarly a buffer overrun in a driver can bring down the system without the kernal being able to do anything (as the attacks on websites by overrunning ethernet cards have shown quite well).
Sun Microsystems is the single most arrogant f*cking company (towards its customers) known to man. Anything that Microsoft has ever been accused of in this area truly pales in comparison.
Corporations would much prefer Solaris 9 to become the standard on their x86 hardware rather than Linux for every possible reason imaginable. Period. But no, Sun and some of the posters on this site are trying to argue with these customers and make lame excuses as to why they don’t really want Solaris 9 on Intel anyway and should stick to what Sun prefers them to buy. I can’t believe the arrogance on display here but it seems to be the norm in the Unix world. I don’t understand how Sun thinks it is ever going to compete effectively with thinking like this (answer: they won’t, unless they stop telling their customers what to think).
Corporations would flock to Solaris 9 on Intel in droves if Sun were to support it and promote it properly. Sure, SCO UnixWare is another high-end x86 Unix alternative, but it does not have the same potential that Solaris 9 does, IMO, because Solaris on SPARC and on Intel are mostly the same code base which is compatibility that customers could leverage usefully. Solaris 9 could compete against the new .NET Servers coming from Microsoft a hell of a lot better than Linux will.
Looks like Sun would be committing corporate suicide if it truly got behind Solaris on Intel the way its customers want (by losing SPARC sales) so they are unable to properly use this asset, which speaks volumes about their business model (overpriced hardware).
RE: SunBlades/eBay – Those low-end Sun workstations are garbage in terms of SPECint compared to an equally priced PC, maybe even compared to an equally priced Apple (Eugenia knows the numbers on this, she posted on it before). Customers should not be forced to resort to shopping on eBay in order to buy affordable hardware to run Solaris. Ask them.
Probably a stupid question, but why does Sun not do the following: –
– Provide a Solaris Based distribution for X86 which includes a set of business productivity apps that run under the Gnome GUI.
– Include StarOffice, Evolution, Nautilus (Fix it up a bit), mozilla or netscape as the standard business apps. Find a suitable graphical database package to compete with Access.
I am assuming of course that some of those apps can be easily ported to Solaris X86.
Sun is an established company not solely focused on Open Software like Redhat for example. This gives them a better chance with many organizations who are looking to replace MS on some of their desks. Also they can differentiate themselves over the Linux crowd far more easily than regular Linux vendors can.
The fundamental problem is that Solaris is a proprietary program; the future of Solaris in any form is controlled by SUNW (Sun Microsystems). If they decide that Solaris should only run on 68000-based Atari ST workstations tomorrow, people will be hunting for STs on Ebay.
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Linux, on the other hand, is not controlled by RHAT (Red Hat). If RHAT falls off of the face of the earth, Linux will survive. RHAT, of course, isn’t going anywhere–in fact, RedHat’s stock is doing better than Sun’s stock ($4.75 versus $3.50).
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And yes, I agree that Sun is an arrogant company, and that some Sun shops have this same arrogance. It was easier for me to get a job working for Microsoft as a Linux wizard than to work for any Sun shop back in the dot-com boom. Than again, both arrogant Sun shops I interviewed for (Excite, Snap.com) are now out of business; and Sun is having their own problems; arrogance is not a good thing for a company to have.
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– Sam
I simply do not understand what sin people feel that Sun is guilty of. Sun made their OS available for x86 at no charge, eating up the download bandwidth costs for everyone that chose to download it. Now they have decided that they no longer want to develop and give away an OS that runs on hardware that they don’t sell, and everyone acts like Sun is Satan incarnate.
Their “free DVD — haha, we just lied to get your e-mail address” ploy was pretty scummy, but ceasing to provide an OS to people that aren’t even their customers hardly seems like some evil empire at work.
The only thing that surprises me is that Sun *EVER* created a version of Solaris that ran on x86 generic boxes. That made the business plan of http://www.rentacondom.com seem brilliant by comparison.
Sam Trenholme wrote:
> RedHat’s stock is doing better
> than Sun’s stock ($4.75 versus $3.50).
You can’t compare two stock prices and decide that one stock is doing better than another based on that. Those two numbers (the prices) have nothing (zero, zilch) to do with one another.
Part of what Sun did wrong was in making the OS free for the taking. Previously, I’ve paid over $900 for it in ’95, then
about $20 since then. What Sun did was create a self-fulfilling prophecy. They didn’t charge for it, so they never made any money. Also, each dowload of it cost Sun approixmately $17. Now, I’m not an MBA or an economics major, but I can see that this was a self defeating move.
Another part of what was wrong with Sun “delaying” Solaris x86 was to not give their customers notice that this would be happening. I use Sun’s term of “delay” instead of the public’s perception of “End of Life.”