Submitted by In a move that would certainly shake up the computer industry quite a bit, IBM is reportedly in talks with Sun Microsystems about the possibility of IBM acquiring Sun. Sun is going through hard times at the moment, and has been actively looking for someone to be acquired by.
Both IBM and Sun have moved to a largely open source product portfolio, and both are not reliant on anything Microsoft or Intel have to offer. IBM and Sun also have their own processor technologies (SPARC and PowerPC) and operating systems (AIX and Solaris). While IBM is the world’s largest server maker with a share of 31.4%, Sun is fourth with a share of 10.6%.
If IBM were to indeed buy Sun, it would be for an amount of round and about USD 6.5 billion, which would be a 100% premium over Sun’s current stock price. IBM could use a boost as companies like HP have made large inroads into the market during the past few years with standardised servers as opposed to the more traditional mainframe approach employed by IBM.
Sun has also approached HP for a possible acquisition, but HP declined the offer. Remember, though, that this is not official news, as it comes form the omnipresent “people familiar with the matter”. However, the source is the Wall Street Journal, which is no small fish. Time will tell.
For us enthusiasts there are also concerns. If IBM were to indeed buy Sun, how much sense would it make for IBM to continue spending money on the development of the SPARC architecture? How much sense would it make to pump money into both Solaris and AIX?
they won’t get much technology which they can use. they’ll probably only kill suns offerings and try to switch the customers to ibm’s servers. rest in peace, solaris!
I think they would put an end to AIX and switch to Solaris/OpenSolaris. Having MySQL and Java in one’s portfolio would be nice too
But IBM already has DB2 and it’s own JVM, both of which are ahead of Sun’s offerings in some respects (eg. scalability). On the OS side, IBM is much interested and invested in Linux, a migration to Solaris would not happen.
IMHO buying out sun is more about getting Sun’s customer base, which IBM is already migrating to its own offerings, as well as having more leverage in determining Java’s future. IBM Symphony is also based off of OpenOffice and IBM is pushing it as a replacement for MS Office. This move could help them embolden Symphony.
I think it’ll be good for everyone, as Sun is dying anyway, and any valuable technology they developed over the years has been open sourced. Any development in progress could use some IBM cash, and there’s a much lower chance of Sun employees losing their jobs if they are acquired compared to just dying a slow death.
Edited 2009-03-18 14:13 UTC
I’ve been testing Lotus Symphony on my MBP for the last week or two and it is a very solid app.
It starts up faster than OO.org and appears to use a lot less memory while running.
Saying that, there are a few slightly annoying quirks but nothing that is a show stopper.
Symphony is a failure and I wish IBM would actually ‘get’ that they should change tac and learn from their failures in the face of Microsoft, Windows and Office. Lotus software is a shadow of its former self because IBM doesn’t get that it is a platform rather than a product and the only way you’ll make headway against Office now is to have something free.
Oh yes, the only way to compete with a product that costs legitimate businesses $380 per complete copy or $80 for individual slices of – is with something that you don’t charge for, meaning you have significantly less development money in the pipe to work with.
OoO and Symphony are cute toys, but even compared to Office 97 they are like a trip in the wayback machine to 1993 in terms of ‘standard functionality’. What is needed is serious development revenue and frankly, you don’t have that when you combine dirty hippy FLOSS with a package that the die hard coding geeks probably don’t spend their entire day relying on. (Which is why free as in freedom free as in beer thrives for things like Apache or mySQL, and feels like the poor relatives you pretend you aren’t home for at christmas when it comes to desktop applications).
I mean, even the simplest of things like the fact that OoO and Symphony STILL kern text like sweetly retarded crack addicts – makes them still feel like toys.
On top of which, if you want where the real money is, you BETTER charge for it. Businessmen are leery of ‘free as in beer’ AND ‘free as in freedom’ because the question becomes “did you even GO to business school?”
Capitolism – don’t knock it, it actually works fairly well.
Actually, I think a more likely scenario is that Solaris becomes the commodity offering on Intel, and AIX will remain the premium offering on Power. Sparc has been a moribund platform for a number of years, and it’ll probably be phased out. Solaris already has a presence on Intel, and I expect that will likely be the platform that becomes it’s new home, and where IBM will migrate Sun’s existing customer base. Over time, you’ll see most of Solaris’s best features migrated to AIX.
As for ever seeing Solaris on Power, I doubt it. If there were any market for it, either IBM or Sun could have offered Solaris on Power already. Neither one of them has shown any interest, most likely because customers haven’t asked for it.
seems like some people read my first comment as flamebait or whatever.
clarification: i don’t think that sun doesn’t have some great technology but fear that ibm might not use most of it because they’ve got their own solutions.
I do hope that IBM (if they buy Sun) continues the great work that Sun has been doing with OpenSolaris. If they kill it there will be one very upset community.
I don’t think they will kill it either. If they wanted to kill something they would kill AIX and replace it with Solaris. What would they win by buying something to kill it? Solaris is one of the best products out there. If they buy it and not leverage it in their offering, they are plain idiots who burn money for the sake of it. I don’t think IBM executives are idiots, they probably know full well the value of Solaris. If they buy Sun, IBM will take the number one spot again and their offering won’t be matched by any other corporation in the world, and they get that for very cheap since Sun is currently massively undervalued by the market.
In my opinion, that would be a Good Thing for IBM, a Good Thing for Sun and a Good Thing for the world.
Edited 2009-03-18 12:53 UTC
Didn’t Palm aquire BE and “killed” it?
Maybe BeOS but not BeIA, the internet appliances platform that Be had been developing.
If it wasn’t for that, Be would have nothing to offer Palm at the time, I’m sure.
I thought an inidan company had since or previously also gotten writes to develop BeOS.
Oh well, with Haiku, it’s kind of a; “the King is dead, long live the King”
I think that was the GoBe productive suite.
That’s wishful thinking really. AIX is only around for historical reasons at IBM, and all of the new stuff is simply being put into Linux. There is really no sense at all in keeping Solaris going. It’s very expensive to keep your own whole OS going these days without cost sharing, even for IBM and Sun.
IBM will do what Sun should have done years ago if this actually materialises – start progressively ditching Solaris, and AIX fully, and share the costs by using Linux. It’s also what Novell should have done with Netware, but haven’t, and they will go the same way.
Wishful thinking. IBM is not interested in acquiring technology that, quite frankly, isn’t that brilliant and that people have been gradually moving from for the past ten years. They’re only interested in acquiring a customer base for a knock-down price.
There is no value to Solaris and hasn’t been for some time, other than cannibalising some code that might prove useful elsewhere. ZFS is the only thing that springs to mind really.
The reason why this is being talked about is because Sun have been stupid for the past ten years, won’t change their ways and without a takeover they will go bankrupt in the not-too-distant future because their cost-base is too high and they can’t fire any more people. I wouldn’t paint this as a good thing for Sun at all. It’s abject failure.
They didn’t do it, and won’t be able to for some time – Linux just can’t scale on larger (say 64 cores and more) server.
Pardon? Linux has been doing it for years. Where have you been living? 64 cores(?!) (processors) is small-fry and there is that inevitable word that people expect to just say or write without quantifying it – scale. You’ve got to laugh.
Edited 2009-03-20 01:18 UTC
I think I even overestimated Linux. Maybe 32 cores max. But enlighten me, show me a link to x86 server with more than 32 (okay, maybe 48) cores.
And just because it is used on some kind of machine doesn’t mean it works well. I could tell you stories from experience how “unbrekable” Oracle Linux is on 8 core AMD server.
Edited 2009-03-21 08:13 UTC
I’m not entirely sure why you’re talking about ‘cores’, but if it’s actually SMP systems you’re talking about (it can’t be anything else) then I think you’ve been living in the dark ages somewhere. Either that or you believe Sun’s marketing literature.
Trust me, it’s been done and people are running stuff with an awful lot more than 32 ‘cores’ in them. Have been for years. To post links would be fruitless and would merely insult your ability to use Google. If that’s beyond you however then SGI have been doing the really big stuff, and that’s with kit with >= 1024 CPUs in them. They’re enormous:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=117580267612045&w=2
Certainly at the time that that thread was posted Solaris had never ran on anything like a 1024 CPU system. To top it off, Solaris doesn’t do RCU locking either:
http://lse.sourceforge.net/locking/rcupdate.html
Linux not scalable? Solaris more scalable? More ‘solid’? I Wouldn’t call it FUD. It’s just outright desperation, but hey, that’s why Sun are in trouble.
Dunno. There’s umpteen people doing it, so maybe it’s just you? I could tell you many stories about Solaris’s exceptionally buggy drivers, many of them IDE drivers that Sun is only now finding out about by using ZFS as a debugging tool, how difficult it is to get software actually installed on Solaris and how it has had to be explained to Sun’s consultants that no, we aren’t going to make SPARC faster by recompiling our open source software in Forte.
However, if you chose Oracle Linux then you probably don’t know what you’re doing anyway so it’s all academic really.
Edited 2009-03-22 01:14 UTC
Because there is difference between a single core-cpu and multi-core one. OS sees multiple virtual processors.
I’m talking about NUMA.
A server and supercomputer are two very diferent things. Supercomputers are usually used for simulations and data processing, whereas servers run tradional stuff like applications and databases. Server’s OS usually has quite difficult task of managing hundreds of processes competing for same resources like disk, memory and network, but a supercomputer just needs to do maths and that’s it. One process on each cpu is a very likely setup. If an OS runs on a supercomputer it proves absolutely nothing. People put Linux on supercomputers because it’s free and easily customizable.
Interresting link, but since I never heared of it, it’s probably not so huge.
Not FUD, not desperation, but a fact. Now it’s time for me to ask you, where have you been living? Linux is just a low-cost OS for a low cost, low end servers (x86). Take Sun Fire M9000, that’s 64 4-core, 8 thread cpus, i.e. OS sees 512 virtual cpus. Corporations run their mission critical stuff like Oracle databases on it. You don’t see anything like that with Linux, ever. Besides, for a server availability is usually more important, because if your applications don’t work, employees can’t do their jobs and you loose money. If your supercomputer goes down, you maybe won’t finish your scientific calculations this week – no big deal, you’ll get it next week.
Seriously, where have you been hiding? All the long-time sysadmins don’t even take Linux seriously.
Linux solid? You call an OS with no stable DDI solid? Take VxVM for example. It has at least dozen different kernel module packages for different kernel versions. That’s a laugh! No other OS (including Windows) needs that. You call OS with multiple incompatible versions solid? And I could go on…
The cause of their problem lies with bad marketing, but I’m not going to discuss that.
It’s not me, it’s people from oracle who were doing the implementation as part of a normal paid project. I can’t think of anyone more competent.
Why not? Every piece of software encouters bugs.
You have IDE drives in your server? Wow.
How? I never had problems, so maybe it’s just you.
I’m not the decision maker here. It’s true, our IT architects failed this time.
“Seriously, where have you [Segedunum] been hiding? All the long-time sysadmins don’t even take Linux seriously.”
Look, this self contradictory, very selective, Segedunum also states that VirtualBox is equally stable, or more stable, than VMware. If he can state that weird thing, he can as well state that Linux is more stable than Solaris and AIX, or “the moon is made of cheese”.
Yes. They’re called SMP systems regardless of whether they use cores in one processor or multiple processors. The distinction makes no difference to the OS or its scalability.
No you’re not. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
No they’re not. You wanted to try and throw a blanket statement over Linux’s scalability and you’ve been shown to be wrong.
Yes, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You profess to cast doubt on Linux’s scalibility where SMP is concerned without knowing you’re talking about regarding SMP.
Sun has been saying that for ten years, and has resulted in this article about takeover rumours. It obviously hasn’t worked because it isn’t true. Deal with it.
Edited 2009-03-22 15:09 UTC
I proved and explained my opinion, I think you should try to do the same (if you can), instead of just doing bold statements. Maybe you should try to read about the topic, because you are the one, who doesn’t know, what he is talking about.
http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa/faq/index.html#numa_v_smp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Uniform_Memory_Access
No I wasn’t. You didn’t come up with any arguments at all, while I clearly explained the differences.
Again, no proof/arguments.
[/q]
I never heared anything official regarding Linux from Sun, maybe some remarks from McNealy when he was a CEO, but that’s not interresting.
If Sun gets bought, it will just prove their marketing staff sucks.
Anyway it is true, that Linux is a low-end (server) OS and some success with small x86 servers proves nothing about its quality, not to mention scalability. Again, you are just making claims whithout giving any evidence, while ignoring what I wrote. Trying to be constructive with you is obivously a waste of time.
Hmmmm. It might help if you actually nailed down what it was that you wanted to talk about. You’re wandering off talking about ‘cores’ when it is multi-processor and SMP systems that you’re trying to talk about, you tried to imply that Linux had scalability issues on anything over 32 ‘cores’ and you’ve had problems with an 8 core AMD system – with zilch to back it up.
Hmmmmmmmmm. Right. NUMA. SMP. Yer. Linux has done it for years. The point is…………..what, exactly?
Yes you did. You had your ass handed to you when I posted an example of a multi-processor workload on a scale that not even Solaris has been doing. That’s certainly what SGI were running there. You then tried to cover your backside by trying to distinguish ‘ordinary servers’ and ‘supercomputers’, which is irrelevant because you specifically talked about scalability. You certainly didn’t define any other metric you might have been talking about, such as the ever popular ‘reliability’.
I posted ample evidence to refute your allegation that Linux couldn’t scale in multi-processor and SMP systems, in the biggest way possible. Literally.
You tried to imply that Linux had trouble on anything over 32 ‘cores’ and that somehow people are having trouble running 8 ‘core’ AMD systems with Linux. There is no description of what those problems are, nothing to back them up and no explanation as to how lots of people are running those very systems without any trouble.
Come on sunshine. We all know Linux doesn’t scale ;-). Where’s the evidence?
How can you market untrue and desperate statements from your own technical people?
If it was a low-end server OS then Solaris should have been absolutely fine over the past ten years with its superior level of reliability and scalability. It hasn’t been because Linux has ate its lunch and has proven itself to be every bit as reliable and scalable, if not more so. There’s only so many ways you can cut it.
You’re the one who needed to provide the evidence with the allegations you made because it’s your points we’re discussing here. You couldn’t do that because they were false.
It’s exactly this mental disease of portraying Linux as a ‘small server’ OS that is putting Sun out of business. They have no response other than to keep repeating the myth, hoping that anyone will listen to their ramblings. It’s clearly not working.
I read your other discussions and I concluded it’s time to end this meaningless chat with you, because – you are a plain idiot and that’s it. Just like someone posted, you know shit about IT, but that doesn’t stop you from insulting others. You think that NUMA and SMP are the same, you think that a server system and supercomputer are the same. This is unbelievable stupidity. You can take 10 000 Windows 95 machines and plug them to SETI @ home – they will be doing more or less the same thing as supercomputers do, (doesn’t matter if clustered or single-image) but you aren’t going to claim that this means that Windows 95 scales great and you aren’t going to ran Oracle on it. Get it? Forget about SGI and supercomputers. I was talking about server systems. That’s lots of processes, competing over resources, locking, MPO, RAS and so on… All Linux vendors sell it on x86 servers. That low end. Now go educate yourself, before you continue wasting other peoples time.
SEGEDUNUM
What is the problem with you?
I (and others) have told you several times that ZFS doesnt need huge amounts of GB to run. ZFS runs fine on 1GB RAM (Ive run ZFS on 1GB for over a year). And still, in every post about ZFS you tell people that ZFS needs huge amounts of RAM, several GB. And you tell people that ZFS end-to-end data integrity is not a big deal, even though it protects against silent corruption. The point of using ZFS is it’s end-to-end data integrity. All the rest is just icing on the cake.
(Ive heard that FreeBSD implementation of ZFS takes much RAM. But that is not proof of ZFS needing much RAM. That is proof that FreeBSD implementation needs much RAM. Not ZFS. Easy to understand the distinction, if you have learned to draw correct conclusions)
We told you that several times, and you just dont listen. You dont get it. Or, choose not to understand. Very selective. Whenever you hear something bad about ZFS or a SUN product, it sticks. When you hear opposite, you just ignore it. Very selective.
Or, is it that you can not keep two contradicting facts in your mind, at the same time? You have to choose between one of them? And then you choose randomly? Or you keep the fact negative to ZFS and SUN? Your L2 cache only fit one piece of fact?
Regarding that SGI machine with Linux. I dont know how many times I have to tell you. I explained this for you recently, and I will have to explain again. I suspect.
Linux on SGI runs a modified custom made kernel. It is not stock Linux. I can modify MS-DOS and run on it several CPUs. BUT THAT IS NOT SCALABILITY, IT IS MODIFIABILITY! But Solaris kernel is the same that runs on machines from Intel Atom to huge servers. THAT is scalability. There are no different versions of Solaris kernel.
But well, I guess there was just a chance epsilon big that you got that. I promise, you will continue to state that Linux is scalable. It is not. If unmodified Linux would run on small devices up to huge servers and to large clusters, then Linux would be scalable. Otherwise, I can modify MS-DOS and call it scalable, using the same reasoning as you do. But noone would call MS-DOS scalable, would they? But, hey, “Linux is scalable”, but MS-DOS is not???? Whats the difference? Clusters dont count as big iron.
There are some contradiction here. I see that, others see that. You dont see that.
Edited 2009-03-22 09:31 UTC
What’s wrong with you lot? Sun’s the one wanting to be sold here. There is obviously sometjhing wrong and I’m afraid you just have a real mental issue over it.
I’m afraid that has absolutely zilch to do with what I talked about in this thread, and has has been explained to you numpties on umpteen occasions about ZFS, just because you’ve ran it on your dinky little laptop for a year it proves jack. The BSD developers have certainly found that it will eat memory unbounded relative to the workload you throw at it. The end.
I never talked abiut ZFS anywhere, this thread was never about ZFS other than using it as a debugging tool for Solaris’s buggy IDE drivers.
I feel for you when the inevitable happens and Sun is taken over. Obviously many people have a pretty big emotional attachment and it will hit them hard.
“A server and supercomputer are two very diferent things.”
“No they’re not. You wanted to try and throw a blanket statement over Linux’s scalability and you’ve been shown to be wrong.”
Ok, if you think that a supercomputer also are used as an ordinary server, be free to believe so. Others, more educated people, know that a supercomputer are used for number crunching. And as such, a supercomputer has a totally different architecture. It is tailored for high throughput of numbers. Reliability is not that crucial. To serve many users with for instance thin clients are not that important. I would like you to post links to one supercomputer were there are lots of users logged in doing ordinary office work. You see, supercomputers only run specialized software, they never run ordinary Office applications. When I programmed our Cray for numerical tasks, I used MPI and C++. I never saw someone using our Cray for Office work. I dont know of any stock exchange using Cray or another supercomputer. They are run on servers with high reliability as highest priority.
Seriously, I think you should try to learn some about IT before you post anything about things you have no idea about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
“They [supercomputers] tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks.
…
Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing.
…
most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.”
You are just too much. People tell you have things are, and show links, and still you refuse to believe anything. No evidence is good enough for you.
Also, when you say that SUN’s VirtualBox is an alternative to VMware in production, you reveal your ignorance.
And that thing about ZFS. I wanted to show that it doesnt matter what we say, nothing can make you change your mind. No evidence in the world suffices. Ive told you that FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation may require 2-3 GB of RAM just to boot up. I dont know about FreeBSD + ZFS. But Solaris implementation of ZFS doesnt require that RAM, it runs well on 1GB RAM. People has run ZFS on 512MB RAM without problems. Other people has told you this as well. But why should you listen to us? Even if the main architect behind ZFS and FreeBSD developers posted here and told you this, you wouldnt believe them. That, I know about you. I promise that even if you installed OpenSolaris on a machine with 1GB RAM and tried out ZFS and you saw ZFS worked fine, you wouldnt change your opionion about ZFS requiring much RAM.
Have you heard about something called Bull headed?
First of all, you’ve replied to the wrong post, so congratulations.
A blanket statement was made about Linux’s inability to scale within SMP systems. It was shown to be false and the poster had his ass handed to him as I posted an example where Linux had scaled beyond anything Solaris had been run on. He then proceeded to cover his backside by trying to imply that the issues involved in scaling SMP in a ‘supercomputer’ and an ‘ordinary computer’ were somehow different. They’re not, and you’ve offered no evidence as to where they are different. He didn’t even know what SMP was.
Besides, there are plenty of ‘ordinary servers’ doing menial tasks on 32 or 64 way hardware running Linux. Either way, you’re talking crap.
ROTFL. It was specifically stated that Linux couldn’t scale with respect to SMP systems. It has been shown to be crap. Deal with it. If you’re not talking about SMP, what are you talking about, because you’re pulling meaningless and unquantifiable words like ‘reliability’ out of the air?
Excuse me while I get back on my chair from splitting my sides.
Hmmmm. Can you give examples like I did to back that up? I made that observation based on the following from personal experience:
1. VMware Workstation (because that’s what it was compared to) has proven itself to have a large and unwieldy codebase with suspension and resuming of VMs in particular proving quite slow and unreliable.
2. VirtualBox has a cross-platform rich client GUI that VMware Workstation just doesn’t have. Theirs has been ditched for a pretty unreliable web interface, largely because they haven’t been able to use reliable cross-platform programming technology.
As has been explained on umpteen occasions I’m really not interested that some l33t people have sat Solaris on a little laptop for several months doing nothing and, OMG, it didn’t crash and burn. When you throw large workloads at it you need several gigabytes of RAM. It’s not something you will see running on a small ARM NAS box any time soon, even though that is the workload it is supposed to perform.
“Besides, there are plenty of ‘ordinary servers’ doing menial tasks on 32 or 64 way hardware running Linux. Either way, you’re talking crap.”
Could you show me some links on this?
Hate to break it to you but Linux is still not as scalable as Solaris or AIX.
It’s also not quite as rock-solid in a fileserver/domain controller role as Netware was. It was very hard to kill Netware 3.12 or Netware 4.
All of these operating systems also have something Linux doesn’t. A stable API/ABI that doesn’t change every kernel revision. Of course most Linux fanbois call that a feature.
I love open source OS’s and software, don’t get me wrong, but my love is for the one true original open source UNIX. BSD.
GNU/Linux is NOT a magic bullet to the world’s problems and is chock full of plenty of flaws just like any other platform.
Sun has plenty of brilliant technologies, some of them are even in Solaris. DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc.
Just because a bunch of people can clone the functionality and offer it for free does NOT make the free product better. Just because you can poach that product’s users with your free buggy implementation doesn’t make your product better. Show me some REAL functionality that has appeared out of a vacuum in Linux? If you say GNOME I’ll slap you.
Where’s the killer features GNU/Linux has that no other free UNIX or commercial UNIX has?
It’s unfortunate that SPARC hasn’t caught on seeing as how it’s an open platform where you wouldn’t have to license the damn instruction set to make your own version.
Just because Sun can’t dump $4,000,000,000,000 into polishing a slow horrible turd of a CPU architecture until it hits the 5GHz mark doesn’t mean that anything non-x86 is crap.
Just because Linux is free doesn’t necessarily make it “better” than real SysV or BSD.
While Linux has a cool development model that ensures fairly rapid innovation, it falls over in many situations because of it. Nothing ever has time to fully mature before it’s replaced with a new and fairly buggy re-implementation. Nothing is truly polished. It feels like a giant beta release all the time. BSD isn’t quite as bad.
That why supercomputer and real research computer run Solarix and AIX … wait they don’t , they almost all run GNU/Linux …
fileserver/domain is dominated by GNU/linux solution …
BSD is the base for SUN … Probably why it’s incompatible with it too …
Unix is owned by GNU/Linux in case you havent followed SCO trial …
What I don’t get is why is GNU/Linux relevent here since it’s so bad in your own words and views , might it be your wrong and your views false …
Hate to break it to you, but I’m afraid wheeling out the word ‘scale’ with nothing to back it up proves very, very little I’m afraid. Linux runs and scales from small ARM NAS systems to things with over 500 processors in them. I also hate to break it to you that Sun has been trying to jump up and down saying this for over ten years – and they’re the ones trying to get bought out ;-).
AIX is around for historical reasons, little more, and no amount of unquantifiable questions over Linux’s scalability will change that. There’s little new code flowing into AIX, that’s for sure. It’s all going one way.
When all else fails, play the scalability card. After all, it’s worked really well for Sun! 🙂
What? Seriously, what planet did you drop in from? Linux and the software around it is used in umpteen file and print installations and Novell and Netware is getting its lunch eaten and has been for years. That’s why Novell have tried, unsuccessfully, to move their business to being Linux based. They simply haven’t got it.
No one cares. It’s Linux that has been eating Solaris’s (the one with the stable ABI) lunch and that’s why we have ended up with this article with Sun looking for a buy out. Goodness me. We’re still too proud to the last to admit the truth.
I’m happy for you and the five people who will end up running it. BSD just hasn’t attracted the investment needed in terms of lines of code and its relative popularity where it has had it (within OS X et al) has not contributed anything back to the well-being of any of the BSDs. Not code, not investment not anything.
So what? An awful lot more people use it than BSD and it’s been eating Solaris’s lunch for ten years, so what does that tell you?
Yep. They’re so brilliant that they’ve pushed Sun into getting bought out.
I’m just wondering how such a sore and bitter post from someone who can’t accept the reality of the current situation got modded up.
Why not? It’s now the default desktop in Solaris :-).
Easy software installation for one, availability and support for a wide range of open source software packages, availability on commodity hardware like x86 and wide range of others that Sun and other Unix vendors absolutely steadfastly refused to do. They nailed their own coffins.
Developers, application support and availability won out. They’re the only killer features that matter otherwise Sun wouldn’t want to be signing on the dotted line.
It hasn’t caught on because it’s slow. Plain and simple. Has been for over ten years when compared with a commodity system based on x86. The raw horsepower just isn’t there. That’s why Sun and SGI’s workstation and chip design business died overnight, especially when Linux could run on x86 where others couldn’t and simply refused to.
Then Sun’s chip business isn’t viable. It’s that simple.
This is just denial I’m afraid, and it comes off as a bit sad. Sun are the ones looking to sign themselves away here. No gloss can be put on that.
Why to buy something to kill it? Very simple. To get their customer’s base.
From my experience (and I *did* work for IBM), it will work probably like this. First, they would put all the development/enhancements of product X on hold. Next they offshore the support, so you would have to have rather painfull conversation with some cow from Bangalore when the feature XYZ does not work. Next they would offer you to replace already obsolete product X with their latest and the greatest product whatever.
Yep, that’s the way it works at IBM. Its crap, sad and awful, but that’s what they do. Everything in a certain area is put on hold and they then start selling everyone something else until the stuff on hold gets completely replaced. Sun have made a big rod for their own backs here by not pulling their fingers out.
Probably won’t kill it but force a license change to something compatible with their own products.
OpenSolaris is SOL anyway as no one in the OpenSolaris community can take the software and do as it wish with it …
That is a nice dream world, IBM has only been drawn into the opensource movement kicking and screaming. IBM got into linux because some Opensource guys were porting Linux to zSystem hardware and to save face(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_on_zSeries history section), IBM did there own port and assisted the other two. IBM has donated some tidbits to the Linux word, and Apache, but IBM is nearly 50 year old software company and besides those two gifts and some press releases, its hard to prove they like OpenSource.
AIX, DB2 are both fairly stagnant a new version every decade and a few opensource packages are ported to AIX as demanded by paying customers.
IBM wants sun for its customers and Patents and some IP, IBM is not about opensource. Under IBM’s loving hands all the opensource progress Sun has made will wither away. see my Blog http://uadmin.blogspot.com for more info.
I thought IBM and Sun worked together in the System-Z port of Solaris so I doubt they’d kill it.
Don’t forget Sun own MySQL and Virtualbox too.
That Solaris is open source. It can not be killed, that is a good point of being open source. The open source community will continue development. And probably Solaris will be GPL so Linux can incorporate ZFS.
If Sun are looking at being acquired I don’t think they would look at relicensing any technologies just in case it lessens their value in the eyes of possibly acquisitive companies such as IBM, HP or Cisco…
OpenSolaris is open source but Solaris isn’t (or at least not in it’s entirety)
Also, re-licensing (Open)Solaris as GPL would necessarily mean ZFS would become GPL too. Remember, one of the reasons ZFS’s license was chosen was because it was incompatible with GPL.
Maybe IBM might back-track that, but I very much doubt it. ZFS is a sizable weapon to have in your arsenal if you’re trying to push (Open)Solaris over Linux.
Can you explain, where you have such information from?
Admittedly it’s mostly hear-say, but I’ve read a few sources that have said the same thing as this:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/8066
There’s logic to the argument and, if it was a deliberate move, it certainly worked on me as I’ve recently switched one of my servers over from Linux to Nexenta.
Edited 2009-03-18 21:54 UTC
That citation might be as true as the statement that Sun has “refused to make them available for anything other than Solaris”
I think that CDDL is a better licese than GPL and obivously it allowed Sun to create products like Fishworks, i.e. bundle together closed and open source software.
Well, Danese Cooper who wrote the CDDL stated on debconf that the solaris kernel engineers had requested that the opensolaris licence be gpl incompatible. This was later disputed by Simon Phipps from sun, however he did not dispute it at the debconf (where he was present).
And I think it makes perfect sense for Sun to release key technology under a licence which means Linux can’t snap it up and compete with them using their own technology. I really can’t blame Sun, from a business perspective (and they are a business) I would have done the exact same thing.
Another option is they could dual license it and only develop the gpl one and modify the other one so that any change is atributed to them and you can keep them as long as you pay IBM for the privilege of closing their code.
MySQL
Virtual Box
Java
Sun One
Sun Studio
Sparc
Open Office
Solaris (inc ZFS)
Hardware tech
Client base
even as I write this list I’m surprised by the number of good, powerful ‘brands’ which IBM would be buying
(i know some are also open source but they are buying the expertise behind it)
… NetBeans
Who gives a flying…
I know. It makes it all the more depressing and makes you wonder how on Earth Sun haven’t been able to maintain their revenue for the past ten years with all the opportunities that those represent.
It is indeed sad. But Sun’s sales channel is a nightmare. They seem to have no clue how to interact with their customer base.
Their technology and products have come a long way in the last few years though.
Just listing “Java” as one technology is itself a huge understatement…
I refered to Java as the programming language and runtime
but you are correct, they have fuzzied the brand and what it represents.
I also listed Sun One (now Sun Java System) which is load of software suites not just a single app/solution
You pretty much put a blanket category there with the Sun One item, but in case anyone doesn’t know that covers many server softwares (which really have lost most of the “SunOne” branding) such as their proxy, web and directory server to name but a few.
Not claiming to know what this will mean for the future of Sun, I personally fear for Virtualbox… I use it an everyday basis and I hope I will be able to in the future aswell without watching it go into a standstill
Like anything else already out there; keep your installs archived and the only thing you loose is future development.
If Backtrack where ever to fall off the face of the earth (unlikely), I have ISO for v2, v3 and v4 when it comes out.
Mandriva decided to go KDE4 which reduces it’s usefullness on low-resource hardware so I popped a blank in my machine and re-cut 2008.1 defaulting to KDE3.
If OpenSolaris has issues in the future, there is nothing stopping a second fork as far as I know; OpenSolaris from Solaris being the first. The source it out there already.
I’d hope Virtualbox would be forked if fudged by IBM in the future but archive your installs or distro packs for it and your good as long as the dependencies hold out.
I wouldn’t really. It’s GPLed and in many ways it makes a far better desktop virtualisation platform than VMware Workstation. It can also be expanded in an infinite number of ways as well. There’s nothing completely comparable to VirtualBox.
it makes a far better desktop virtualisation platform than VMware Workstation
Joke of the year.
Discussion and reasoning were never your strong points ;-).
I’ve been using VMware Workstation as well as various other VMware products using the same codebase, and it is a pretty large bloated mess. You only need to look at how much larger the installer is compared with VirtualBox to see how much of a ‘joke’ it is. VirtualBox also has a far better desktop console that, lo and behold, actually works well cross-platform whereas VMware are ditching theirs in favour of a woeful web interface. It gets more woeful every time I use it now. Oh, and VirtualBox is free.
VMware is living on borrowed time. The joke’s on them unless they do something.
Second joke of the year.
Measuring drive space is your issue?
I measure stability, speed and reliability, VMWare wins hands down.
Not that VirtualBox is a bad product, but is not as good as VMWare, oh, but I forgot, anything that has the “Build with Qt” in yout dictionary is always superior (at least the GUI), talking about biaz.
Edited 2009-03-18 16:26 UTC
Ok, so where’s VMWare for my Alpha, SPARC, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS based systems?
That is why Virtualbox is superior.
I seem to remember replying to this for some reason, but Thom might have got sore about it ;-).
VMware Workstation has a ton of shortcomings, and it most certainly isn’t faster than VirtualBox. Speed and reliability? Based on what?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, now we get to the punchline and what this is really about. I’m sorry that you’re sore that Qt is proving a better cross-platform technology to write VirtualBox in, is helping them write less code when compared to VMware and is providing them with a rich client console that actually works well cross-platform, but, you know, there’s nothing I can do about that ;-).
I don’t call that bias. It just works better.
Actually the joke here is you forgetting that now the two could be merged and are still discussing the way it was …
And what merge has to do with this?
Nothing?
yeah, nothing.
That’s my point , you don’t see merging as relevent and are discussing “the way it was” … not the way it will be.
??????
Dude, go back on topic.
Things that do not work when running VMware Server/Workstation with Linux as the host:
– Sound: VMware does not support ALSA and has broken support for OSS. VirtualBox supports ALSA, OSS, and PulseAudio.
– Wireless bridging: VMware used to be better than VirtualBox in this, able to handle bridging with wired connection easily. Now VirtualBox can bridge both wireless and wired connections easily.
Things that VirtualBox does better:
– Ability to set Bios time: With “VBoxManage modifyvm -biossystemtimeoffset”, you can, for example, set your virtual machine’s time to be 365 days in the past, yet have it “in sync” with your host’s time (i.e. always 365 days slower).
These things can be vital for home users. VMware has definitely lost its edge in this particular market.
if ibm buy sun, surely it will kill sparc and solaris
ibm could take some idea of the sparc architecture and put it in the powerpc…. same thing for solaris
great buy for ibm, i think
also ibm get java, netbeans…
i hope ibm would not kill netbeans…
I really hope they won’t kill the Sparc.
SUN is doing interesting things in the Rock Sparc, in openSourced many cores/many threads T1 & T2 Niagara chips, far more orignal than the brute-force 5GHz in-order POWER6.
NO Value in Java.
It’s a loss-leader. They spend a lot of money keeping that software up to date for what kind of revenue?
I highly doubt that the licensing and branding revenue offsets the development costs. Highly Doubt it.
Java is still very actively used. Sure SUN is not making any money off of it…but that doesnt mean there is no value in kepping Java up to date
You obviously don’t know much about Sun’s Java operations do you… Sun makes quite a bit of money on Java in the form of support contracts and high end system integration gigs at companies like e-bay, GM, and The Vatican. And lets not forget about JavaME support contracts either.
Edited 2009-03-18 17:47 UTC
That is still much less than 1% of Sun’s revenues.
Also I work for the Department Of Works & Pensions in the UK, our main benefit systems are coded in Java for portability. So obviously we have a large vested interest in the continuing development of Java.
some sparc processor is gpl now… but now body have used the information to build and sell some cpu…
I’m sure that if IBM buys SUN the following products will disappear:
1. NetBeans (In favor to Eclipse)
2. OpenSolaris and Solaris (In favor to Linux and AIX)
3. Glassfish
Sun represents the new wave of OpenSource products in my eyes and if IBM buys SUN that movement and spirit will be killed.
Edited 2009-03-18 13:27 UTC
How could Solaris be killed off in favor of Solaris (point #2 you made)?
I doubt IBM will kill alot of these products. IBM is firmly staking its future in a data-center consolidation strategy and cloud computing. I think Open Solaris and some of Sun’s hardware fits firmly into the strategy. Also – IBM is heavily heavily into Java and development of products using Java – I do know many people inside IBM use NetBeans IDE and Glass Fish. IBM will maintain a heterogeneous environment to see which one will fit best.
Regarding SPARC – I am not sure how it will play out, but IBM will leverage the chip design talent at SUN because micro-electronics has been identified as a core market for IBM.
This acquisition makes sense on many levels.
I think that they wil kill MySQL, too. Like they did with Informix. Considering Solaris….well, they don’t even care for their own AIX.
I am not sure about the OpenOffice, IBM has no interest in office software today, despite of the fact that they started as office “hardware” vendor. Yes, OO is open source, but will they be able to go on without company support ?
They don’t have to kill products, they could just stop taking care about them.
Dell has been mentioned in the rumours too – and seems to make more sense than IBM. Sun’s problem has often been that they are just very bad at selling the good stuff they make, Dell could help out there. There’s also no high end overlap with Dell.
…to finance the NetBeans IDE devlopment. Eclipse is IBM’s child and NetBeans (Sun) a direct competitor. So will NetBeans development be dropped? NetBeans is a really nice IDE and can easily compete with Eclipse.
And what is about VirtualBox? Does IBM have a competitive solution for desktop virtualization? I do not know any but is desktop virtualization even an issues for IBM? Will VirtualBox also be dropped?
These are just two products that do not fit in IBM’s portfolio.
Sun made a mistake in SPARC development with UltraSPARC III, when they decided to do a conservative, quick optimisation design without any new technologies like the competitors were doing. It turned out that developing a whole new design takes the same amount of time to debug whether you use new technologies or not, so it ended up being a generation behind in performance without the advantage of being earlier than the others (it was actually later).
In contrast, Fujitsu implemented it’s next generation SPARC64 using the same performance techniques as the competitors, and ended up with a competitively performing CPU – which is why Sun is now using Fujitsu’s version.
Sun is now going in the opposite direction and has plans to incorporate very ambitious new technologies in the “Rock” version of their SPARC CPU. In contrast, all the competing CPUs, such as Intel and AMD, and POWER, have few new performance features, and are now mostly just adding cores or multithreading (to catch up with a different, highly parallel version of SPARC which Sun bought from another company and made its own).
The result is that, of the next generation of CPUs, Sun is the only one that is likely to have any sort of genuine technology breakthrough. Among the potential technologies is the idea of a “scout thread” which can predict and pre-fetch instructions and data into caches, and transactional memory, which could make multithreading vastly faster and more reliable (a database taking advantage of it, like MySQL, could really fly). Sun has also done a lot of work on asynchronous logic, which lets faster operations complete without always waiting for a clock signal to proceed – I don’t know if there will be much of that in the “Rock”, but it has a lot of potential to vastly reduce power consumption while increasing speed.
I’d like to see this introduced, if only to get some innovative experimental technologies into the real world where they can do much good. Genuine processor and architecture development seems to have come to a standstill over the past few years, even though there are still potential new developments. The problem is that many are not incremental, and need a “leap of faith” which, right now, only Sun seems to be up for – possibly out of desperation (it still has Fujitsu to fall back on if “Rock” doesn’t work), but it’s doing it nonetheless.
that would be a terrible thing.
IBM would
– kill Solaris for sake of crappy aix
– kill Sun Java for sake of crappy ibm java
– kill netbeans for sake of eclipse or ratıonal crap
– kill glassfish for sake of bloated pig called Websphere
– kill servers (chaper)
– kill mysql for sake of db2
And unlike Sun products, apart from eclipse no IBM product is open source. This would be a terrible terrible thing for the IT industry.
I totally agree that this would be a catastrophic event in the IT Industry.
”
IBM would
– kill Solaris for sake of crappy aix
– kill Sun Java for sake of crappy ibm java
– kill netbeans for sake of eclipse or ratıonal crap
– kill glassfish for sake of bloated pig called Websphere
– kill servers (chaper)
– kill mysql for sake of db2
“
This is my fear, too – especially Netbeans and Glassfish, both of which are vastly superior to IBM’s current offerings. Over the last year or so, Netbeans has seriously leapfrogged ahead of Eclipse. And Glassfish is quite nice, too. And practically anything is better than Websphere. Heck, a steaming pile of dung is better than Websphere. I’ve done other Java devs who have sworn to never take a contract that uses Websphere, ever again. The thing is a nightmare.
And oh yeah, both Swing and JavaFX will suffer bit rot, as IBM is the creator and principle maintainer of SWT.
All in all, I’d rather Sun got to HP, Dell, or Fujitsu.
I am in favor of Sun getting acquired. I just have serious doubts about Sun surviving long term on it’s own. And being the owners/maintainers of Java, Sun getting acquired would be a good thing.
I doubt it. There are still a lot of Solaris users out there (some even running solaris on IBM hardware), and IBM want their support contract and consultancy money. Killing Solaris means that they’ll have to move to another platform, moving to another platform means the posibility of moving to another vendor and all of a sudden IBM will be competing for customers they could have had ‘for free’.
Probably more of slow merger than a quick killing. Yea, There’ll eventually only be one JVM, but only after the best features from both have been mereged and IBM has has made damn sure that any customer switching from either JVM to the new JVM won’t lose any features or performance.
Quite possibly, but since netbeans is open source it will probably survive if it really is that much better at certain things than eclipse.
Probably not in the short term for similar reasons as Solaris. You don’t want to make your existing customers think about the posibility of switching vendors.
Again I doubt it. IBM makes it’s money from support, service and consultancy. They really don’t care too much what hardware you run. Sure where there is overlap they probably won’t keep two lines going, but where Sun does something interesting, like Niagara, I don’t see IBM simply killing it.
MySQL and DB2 play in two different leauges. If IBM is smart they’ll use mysql as a gateway drug. Start you off on MySQL and once you hit a situation that MySQL can’t handle offer you some very nice tools to easily migrate your database to DB2.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned ODF and OpenOffice.org, considering that IBM was a major supporter of ODF through the whole disgusting OOXML becoming an ISO standard.
Lotus Notes is available to about 150 seats, and includes their own fork of OpenOffice.org, hell OpenOffice.org if hitting 50million downloads of v3.
I’m also surprised nobody has mentioned patents, as I suspect acquiring Sun would offer any company protection.
The interesting thing is what certainly what is going to happen following this…if it ever happens.
would be good thing.
All this blind speculation is getting absurd.
What a news! Never thought it would go this far. Not sure how this is a good thing, but I think that’s the better thing to do for Sun.
I dont think IBM would kill much of Sun’s offer. In fact, I guest it will integrated and merge a lot of their product to their line. There is no value in a competitor buyout if its only its customer base. They could have let Sun die and pick up their customers afterward. If they buy it now and drop all their offer, many angry customers could go elsewhere.
Now, what could happen to:
Solaris
IBM has no reason to maintain two Unix versions. AIX is still there for historical and political reasons. But Solaris is somewhat more alive than AIX. IBM could either merge the two code bases, ripp off Solaris and integrate its functionality into AIX OR, ripp off both and integrated them to Linux (they could need a white flag from Novell for Unix stuff but that shouldn’t be hard).
Sun with finantial problems? but waith, I thought its open source embracement would grant it infinite incomings and eternal life.
Edited 2009-03-18 15:12 UTC
It would have done – if they actually got the concept of open source software and actually used it to commoditise things that would give them spin-off benefits and lower their costs rather than just threatening the things they wanted to sell all along. Using the phrase ‘open source’ was just a poor marketing ploy in the hope that open source software, and Linux on x86 in particular, would all just ‘go away’ and people would miraculously come back to Solaris and SPARC. This mindset has been going on at Sun for well over ten years now, and I would laugh if it weren’t so sad. Girls don’t kiss guys who throw away their livelihoods ;-).
They’ve had everything they needed at their disposal to make a real mint have Sun.
It’ll be an interesting move by IBM with a nice client base to grab hold off. I think IBM would probably keep most of sun running by itself.
Dell entering that arena would be incredibly interesting as that would give them a massive foothold in the enterprise arena.
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/
The blog above is a good place for updates from sun
they have soooooo many overlapping products, there would be masive discontinuations. now i like a lot of IBM’s stuff but I like a lot of Sun’s stuff too.
I hope Sun stays on it’s on 2 feet. With ROCK not that far off it would be a shame to not see if the company can save itself.
Agree with the people who dont like this – This is absolutely terrible .. Where does the competition go now ?! Soon the reality of science fictions past will become reality – one or a few multinational entities will rule the world.
relicense ZFS under GPL NOW!!!!!!!!
Relicense Linux under CDDL or BSD now!!!
The funny thing is , how come no OpenSolaris community distribution or BSD community make an offer to buy there commercual entity namely SUN …
You also forget that SUN is a big funder and material giver to the BSD projects …
To me, it would make more sense for Cisco to buy Sun than either IBM or HP…
But at this moment, 6.5 Billion may be too much for them…
Apple purchasing Sun would be an interesting move if nothing else.
It’s not that long since Sun were rumoured to be considering a purchase of Apple either.
I said this a while ago that Solaris would not last much longer and I got shut down.
AIX is strong for IBM, very stable and VERY secure, they will keep selling that on their big iron. On the lower end I think IBM will push people off Solaris and to Linux.
Linux is more flexible and also there are a lot more people these days using it.
How is linux more flexible? I am curious what you have to back up that statement.
What makes the Linux kernel flexible is how easy it is to port it. As you know its been ported to almost every hardware configuration you can think of. From Phones, to set top boxes to PC’s to Super Computers.
Solaris has been ported to what? X86 sparc and maybe one or two other platforms.
Yes Open Solaris has a much bigger HAL then Solaris proper, Linux can be ported quickly to almost anything you throw at it.
The other flexibility is that no one company controls it so there are no restraints to what you can do to it. So for the customer or random developer you can do whatever you want with it. It doesn’t fall under some restrictive Sun (IBM) license. Notice that there are tons of versions of linux and even the linux kernel. When open solaris was first talked about people acted like Slow Laris was so much better then Linux and when it went open source that would be the death of Linux. LOL! Not.
No one serious has given Open Solaris a good look. Meaning that hosting companies still push Linux, companies that sell virtual servers still push Linux, companies doing cloud computing still push Linux.
Open Solaris has not taken off and Solaris proper is dieing.
What has that go to to do with the price of fish? The problem with Solaris isn’t the lack of technology, it is the lack of leadership within Sun to bring all the products together in a cohensive offering to customers so that a solution can work out of the box rather than having to spend thousands on assembling the individual componens oneself.
There is a reason why Windows has made a jump in marketshare on the server – people want turnkey solutions and Sun is still stuck in the day when the likes of SCO were charging extra on their products for the TCP/IP stack, UFS support and individual components. Customers don’t want that, they want an out of the box turn key solution.
Who uses HAL? neither Linux nor OpenSolaris uses HAL; OpenSolaris have good separation between platform specific code and agnostic code but you could hardly qualify a smart programming decision as equating to the implementation and use of a HAL akin to that of Windows NT line.
Just because something is popular or well marketed doesn’t mean that the product is inherently superior.
I wish people would spend a bit of time to ask themselves why Linux originally took off in the first place – based on its early beginnings 12 years ago instead of listening to rabid fanboys like yourself who jumped on the Linux bandwagon in the last 3-4 years. If you understand why Linux took off then you’d realise why dimissing OpenSolaris or any other opensource alternative is a stupid precept at best.
Except that everyone should have learned by now that turn key solutions are a really bad joke.
The Oracle PeopleSoft HR/Academic Records product was supposed to be a system wide turn key solution for the California State University system. Billions of dollars, a decade and a multitude of consultant firms later, it still doesn’t work.
So you blame crap project management for the failure of a product to work; you do realise that HUMANS have to implement things and thus HUMANS can make monumentally stupid decisions? Also, to use a public service fiasco as an example? good lord, that would be as bad as me blaming IBM for the INCIS project in New Zealand that turned into a $200million white elephant.
No. I’m not blaming it on Oracle. No matter who the vendor was it would have been a debacle. The problem is the very concept of turn-key.
The reason the system doesn’t work is because it’s a “turn-key” product that’s supposed be everything to everybody. The end result is that it’s so big and so complicated that it has bugs out the wazoo, and no lone person can comprehend any more than a minute portion of it at any one time.
You’re right, it was bad project management. Here are the reasons for it:
1. desire for a turn-key solution
2. attemp to unify 23 campus using said turn-key solution.
If one company has enough knowledge about their customer base then it should be easy to cover 80% through the provision of templates with the last 20% being provided with the necessary tools to customise the scenario templates to suit their unique circumstances.
Lets not try to delude ourselves thinking that there are massive differences when it comes to what people want to do; there is a basic goal which one wishes to achieve – if your turn key solution is so inflexible that it doesn’t allow the customisation to be build on top of the basic template then the issue is crap system design and analysis of customers needs rather than the concept of turn key solutions being a failure.
It is also a failure when people assume that turn key solutions mean ‘no work at all’. If you walk around thinking that it will result in no work then you’re sorely mistaken. Turn key means ‘minimal work’ not ‘no work’ as so long as the vendor provides the necessary tools (as mentioned previously).
Edited 2009-03-19 01:46 UTC
It’s Free Software , that’s why it took off , you got real community and commercial involvment witch you don’t get in so called **Open Source**.
MIT … Open Source.
BSD … Open Source
Open Solaris … Open Source.
No, it was first used commercially in the ISP arena by people who wanted a cheap, good enough UNIX like operating system to run their servers with. FreeBSD was being tied up with legal wrangles and thus Linux pulled ahead. If FreeBSD never had the legal wrangles I am sure that FreeBSD would have pulled ahead.
It had nothing to do with opensource and everything to do with a a cheap GET solution whilst the UNIX world was charging $20,000 for workstations and thousands ontop of that for their operating system and charging for individual components of the operating system.
Edited 2009-03-19 01:20 UTC
Wrong
The first viable commercial entity was selling GNU/Linux on diskette … Internet was slow as hell in most places. ISP came in much later when the internet we know today started to take off around 1996-1998.
FreeBSD is 1993
“FreeBSD’s development began in 1993 ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD
BSD is 1970’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
FreeBSD was not even part in the lawsuit … it also happened in 1992.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
Apple , Microsoft and SUN , etc , are the ones who made the billions … not the BSD community.
Actually it had everything to do with **real** Open Source and not the marketing phrase Open SOurce.
– GNU/Linux put **everything** online and said come play with it and let’s share idea and we can all work freely on it as nobody can close it.
– BSD is and was : we are the best , we need no one , we make the perfect system , your opinion and code is worthless until we say it’s good.
UNIX was beaten by Microsoft and Apple who used BSD for it’s based and part of it’s core.
SUN as very direct relation with BSD’s one of it’s founder is : Bill Joy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
—–
http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2007/02/24/larry-ellison-on-apple-…
In 1997 In 1997, Apple was mired in questions surrounding it’s future, unsure of its footing within the computer industry and counting down its days of glory. In the words of Sir Wikipedia:
On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors after overseeing a 12-year record-low stock price and crippling financial losses. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO and began a critical restructuring of the company’s product line.
At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into partnership with Microsoft.
—–
What’s the point ? Apple get sued , they got to a point everyone had them on the out or dead … Since then they even switched patform from PPC to Intel … They also are a commercial entity , they sale and support their product and they invest billion in development.
Their is three mainstream OS :
#1 GNU/Linux
#2 Microsoft
#3 Apple
By usage.
BSD as been around since the 70’s … as never been mainstream and probably never will be Due to their own hubris.
Edited 2009-03-19 02:42 UTC
You are wrong yet again for failing reading comprehension:
Who said anything about selling linux – I am talking about Linux use in the commercial space. I raised the point that one of the first uses in the commercial space was in ISP’s who wanted a good enough UNIX like operating system that ran on cheap PC hardware that was available at the time. They were some of the first Linux customers.
As for the rest of the post; its worthless waffle that has nothing to do with the kernel of the post; the point I was making was that Linux got a foot hold into the commercial world through its use in ISP’s then it expanded out beyond that. With the dot-com boom Linux use expanded out beyond the ISP’s, and into the other commercial entities who wanted to have an online presence, then it moved into the back ends of organisations. Again, these customers saw Linux as good enough technology (GET) to do the job.
Again, why you have even raised the issue of selling Linux – it is completely irrelevant to the discourse taking place – its the equivalent of jumping up and randomly screaming out, “I love pink fluffy bunny slippers”.
Edited 2009-03-19 03:13 UTC
That would be me …
No , I also replied to one quoted point I disagreed with see here :
http://www.osnews.com/thread?353752
Then you went on a diatribe about how you think it got started , to witch I rightfully replied it was wrong and offered correction :
http://www.osnews.com/thread?353791
To point out the obvious :
1991 when it started.
1996 when the ISP became customer.
1992
1993
1994
1995
are missing from your reality and apparently don’t mater. ( hello !! that’s when the major distribution got started )
http://www.linux.org/info/linux_timeline.html
http://futurist.se/gldt/gldt93.png
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment….
No ISP as big contributor …
It’s time to face reality , GNU/Linux did the work other refused to do or where unable to do , there is no luck or special parnership involved as most BSD have 1 or 2 ISP as there contributer/funder. Yahoo also existed before Google …
Windows marketshare on the server is only large for workgroup serving. They took out Novell and Banyan for that market. Not any Unix or Linux products. Super computing is Linux, Webhosting is Linux, Email hosting is Linux, a lot of home and office networking is Linux.
I didn’t mean HAL, I meant HCL That was a typo.
Also I didn’t say that Solaris was not good. What I said was the Linux was more flexible.. Meaning you can do more with it, you can use it on more hardware, the license is more flexible etc. Companies want that, companies like that, which is why Red Hat is killing Sun. Oh and lets talk about some other stuff that actually does suck with Solaris! The compiler!!! Sucks. The way you patch and install software in Solaris sucks!! (Which is why they had to get Linux guys to come on and show them how to try and make solaris more Linux like) the OS install process SUCKS!
Oh and lets look at BSD. Why did BSD not take off like Linux? It was around before Linux (Like Solaris) Because still BSD is just not as flexible nor is the license. People always say “The BSD is better, the license is better” Yeah the license is better for companies like MS to come along and steal code and ideas and not give 1 line of code back! (Which happened)
Oh and I am not a Johnny come lately Linux or other OS fan boy. I am a a LONG time Linux user that was using Linux when Metro X was the config tool. When Caldera was cool and Banyan was the number one workgroup server environment. So I was around when Linux got popular, I helped it get there by replacing Windows servers, Unix servers and Novell servers for my customers with Linux. And I said months ago that Sun was done, Solaris was done. When a company like Red Hat makes less then half the money you do but has close to the market cap, there is a MAJOR problem.
Any way if IBM buys Sun, Solaris will be dead. Might want to get on the Linux bandwagon while we are still accepting members. LOL!
Pardon? you obviously haven’t seen the numerous deployments of Exchange, Sharepoint (as part of the Office System). I shudder when I see these things deployed but at the same time I realise that is what customers want.
For example, there are replacements for the whole Microsoft stack already out there – why isn’t there an organisation who can pull all these projects together, integrate them into an operating system, put a nice easy to use front end on it – and sell it.
Again, out of the box turn key solution that works with minimum fuss and bother.
A big list of hardware doesn’t mean that the hardware is fully supported or the quality of the support is up to standard, able to be supported on alternative architectures or just a matter of recompiling given that drivers have platform specific code.
Yes I work for the US government so I see MS used all the time everyday. But as I said mostly for Workgroup tasks like File and Print serving. Yes Sharepoint is doing well, but again for Workgroups, same with Exchange.
But when it comes to other tasks like web hosting, database hosting and edge serving like mail bridgeheads for Exchange, real DNS (Not that MS auto update crap) IDS’s, Firewalls etc people use Linux or Unix for that.
Novell has that whole stack with their Open Workgroup Server. Which includes Edirectory, Mysql, Groupwise, File and Print Sharing etc. BUT Novell sucks at marketing and their channel can’t come close to MS.
True, but we already see the LARGE number of every day devices that Linux is used on and used well on, from Tivo to the Google G1. When people think of “Unix or Unix like” they think of Linux, not Solaris, AIX, BSD or SCO. Only Solaris lovers use Solaris at this point.
I mean a simple example of how flexible Linux is. We had 200 IDS devices that we got from Cisco to monitor our network. They cost an arm and a leg and they sucked. The guy who managed them decided one day they could do it better and cheaper with Snort. Now to do this do you think Solaris was thought of?? Nope. Not even on the table. The guy grabbed Debian Linux, found a place to get 200 small rack mount servers, built an in house Apt server and built his own custom IDS OS from Debian. Set it up so he could quick ghost 10 IDS’s at a time and have them sent to the remote offices in the field. We replaced all 200 in like a month, all running Debian, saving tons of money and headache. Simple. Could you roll your own version of Solaris or Open Solaris real quick? Not.
That is where Linux shines.
People have been ducking it for a long time but Solaris is dead. It might linger like OS2 but that is about it.
You are right that noone really cares about solaris outside of high end servers, but I don’t think sun is crying over it. Whether or not Solaris runs on iPods is completely irrelevant to how well it runs on the high end servers it was designed for.
I do get where you are coming from, but I think it is an odd point to bring up. The best operating systems (imho) are the ones that focus on a single task and do it very well, not the ones that do everything in an average way.
Then why is it SUN who is getting sold today …
The one making the most money , tru illegal and criminal move , is Microsoft anyway. They don’t focus on one single task … It’s also not trusted on anything that need to be secure.
Problem is that in the Data center Red Hat is eating Solaris up. On high end servers like supercomputers Linux beats the next OS 5 to 1
Remember MS has never had the best OS but they have pushed it right. Linux can do everything Solaris can. Maybe not as good yet but Linux distros are getting better and better. Plus you loose the lock in. Don’t like Red Hat support then you just roll to CentOS or Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
Also you say Sun is not crying that Solaris doesn’t do all the 50 things Linux can do but Sun hired people like Ian Murdock to help make Open Solaris more like Linux. And then try to be like Red Hat with Fedora and roll the changes back up to the main line Solaris.
You are very right it is a strange point but geek guys love the fact that Linux can run on a coffee pot. LOL!
Well, I’d say that Linux has been demonstrated to be useful on a much broader range of different hardware than Solaris. IBM even put it on a writwatch, and uses it regularly on their mainframes. And pretty much everywhere in between where AIX’s tight integration with the hardware doesn’t make more sense. (AIX doesn’t compete with Linux or Solaris as much as some might think.) Much of the reason that IBM was attracted to Linux was to unify their lines of servers. It depends upon the situation, of course. But I’d say that overall there’s a pretty good basis for saying that Linux is more flexible today, in 2009. Especially at IBM.
And unlike Sun, they really have no reason to do an about face and push Solaris, except with Sun’s existing Solaris customers. Likely, OpenSolaris would be truly opened up (as oposed to the “sort of open” joint copyright situation we see now) and it, and its community, will either float or sink based upon what that community is able to accomplish.
This purchase, if it actually occurs, could actually clean up the landscape a bit. I like the idea.
Edited 2009-03-18 19:58 UTC
IBM and Sun have very different business models.
Sun builds platforms that integrate into (and perform well on) their hardware as a way to sell their hardware. They couldn’t care less about solaris running on generic hardware other then the community building effect it has. If there are more people making the solaris experience better, the solaris experience may translate into SPARC sales down the line.
IBM transitioned a few years back from that same sort of thing into an “eSolutions” company. Their bread and butter is in consulting now, rather then selling hardware. Because of that it doesn’t make sense to pour resources into developing and supporting an operating system when can contribute less resources to get an existing operating system to do what they want it to. It was a very clever move, I have a friend who works there who says it was a very big gamble that ended up paying off, but that it could have been the end of Big Blue.
I think that IBM is more interested in finally having control over the Java brand then anything to do with Solaris. What I don’t like about that is that IBM is even more of a fan of big corporate standards consortiums that produce impractical specs very slowly, and that is the last thing Java needs more of.
I agree with what you were saying about opening solaris and that being a good thing for everyone else though.
Especially when they already have an OS that does that, and in which they already have a marketing investment.
That makes the most sense, yes.
I think that finally finding out whether OpenSolaris will sink or swim on its own is ultimately a good thing no matter which way it turns out.
Edited 2009-03-18 22:31 UTC
Microsoft and Cisco will buy IBM soon at this rate and Linux will become Microlinux. Soon people will be afraid to fly and rockets will hit wrong targets.
I think the main interest here is Java and OpenOffice. I can’t see IBM giving a crap about SPARC. IBM already incorporates Java and OpenOffice into their products and it would be better for IBM if they controlled them. As for OpenSolaris I’m betting it is going to die. I don’t think IBM is going to retain the Sun license if they do buy Sun and this means we may see ZFS and DTrace GPLed. OpenSolaris doesn’t have much of a community anyway and if those two technologies are GPLed it would take away two major reasons that some people prefer OpenSolaris. IBM already has AIX and Linux, I don’t think they are looking for another UNIX.
jon stokes has thought about the why:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/03/report-ibm-eyes-sun.ar…
IBM has a radically different culture than Sun, so it’d be interesting to see how they meshed if indeed IBM did buy Sun. IBM’ers don’t quite all wear the blue suits like they used to, but they’re still far more of a starched-collar crowd from the East Coast compared to Sun’s West Coast tech company culture.
I don’t think there are many people that would judge AIX to be superior to Solaris, but even so, IBM culturally doesn’t seem like a company that would own up to AIX being inferior to Solaris, and so probably wouldn’t decide to kill AIX in favor Solaris. If IBM bought Sun, I’d say it’s a pretty good chance (although not a forgone conclusion) that if anything got axed, it would be Solaris.
Open Solaris is open sourced of course, but most of the development is done by Sun. If it were orphaned, it’d be interesting to see if anything of substance would be done with it.
Lotus Notes is an awful, awful blight on the world of IT. I’m no Outlook fan, but Notes is just *terrible*. It was what, 2007? before Notes had in-message on-the-fly spell checking (where the misspelled words are underlined in red) and then only in beta. I couldn’t believe when I had to manually click the “spell check” button.
Edited 2009-03-18 23:40 UTC
The rise of the Blue Sun: IBM and Sun :
http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_rise_of_the_blue_sun_ibm_and_sun
According to this:
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/03/18/ibm-said-to-be-buying-sun-…
All I can say is that it will be an information technology powerhouse that would make Microsoft squirm in its metaphorical seat.
Edited 2009-03-19 01:10 UTC
IMHO this deal would benefit MS instead of scare him.
I assume you mean from the point of view that as an organisation becomes larger and more bureaucratic that it becomes more difficult to respond to changes; its like turning around a massive boat, it takes a lot of time. By the time the boat has changed directions Microsoft might already have 80% of the market place.
There is a risk of that but I have a feeling that there are some great ideas in Sun that simply need the financing required and IBM has that money to turn many of these good ideas into real products as part of their larger strategy.
Ive heard there are people claiming Linux scales well. Well, they are wrong. And maybe less intelligent to state such an argument, because they draw the wrong conclusions (lack of logic and math studies).
The thing is, Linux runs on big clusters, yes. But that doesnt means Linux scales well. In fact, Linux on big clusters is a modified Linux kernel. It is not stock Linux kernel. I could take C64 emulator and make it run on big clusters by redesigning the code, but I would be quite dumb if I claimed that C64 scales well.
Linux runs on wristwatches to large clusters, but it is a modified non standard Linux kernel. Of course you could modify C64 or Solaris or MS-DOS to do that as well. That is not a proof of scalability, it is a proof of Linux being modifiable.
When we talk about scalability, (llama): We’re not talking about clusters. We’re talking about single-system-image big iron, where _one_ kernel runs on a single machine with > 16 CPUs in a cache-coherent shared-memory system. The most cost-effective machines for cluster-building, in CPU power per dollar, are dual-socket quad core Intel Core2-based machines. i.e. 8 cores per node. That’s great if you have a workload that has some coarse-grained parallelism, or is embarrassingly parallel, e.g. processing 100 separate data sets with single-thread processes that don’t depend on each other. That’s not so great if you have a lot of processes that need fine-grained access to the same shared resource. The canonical example here is a database server handling a database with a significant amount of write accesses. Otherwise you could just replicate it to a big cluster and spread the read load around. Locking for write access in a big cluster, even with low latency interconnects like infiniband, is still _way_ higher overhead than you’d get in e.g. a 4 or 8 socket quad-core machine. Even NUMA big iron is better suited for this than a cluster.
CLUSTERS DON’T COUNT AS BIG IRON. They’re just a pile of normal machines. They do have their uses, though.
Linux scaling experts dispells the FUD of Linux scales bad. They spend lots of energy to explain that Linux scaling bad is only FUD from evil vendors, and that Linux scales very good.
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…
Lastly he says things as:
“In 1998, Linux would successfully run on one to two CPUs. Today, it can handle eight or more CPUs.”
“With the 2.6 kernel, the vertical scaling will improve to 16-way.”
Wow! 16 cpus! That is really really good! (NOT). Why does he talk about large Linux clusters with thousands of machines as a proof on Linux scales well, and at the same time declares that in several years from now, Linux will handle 16 cpus? Is 16 CPUs something to brag about?
“Question: Two years from now, where will Linux be, scalability-wise, in comparison to Windows and Unix?
O’Keefe: It will be at least comparable in most areas.”
Wow. Bad Linux scaling is really FUD. I am convinced now. *sarcasm*
Morons.
Solaris scales from Intel Atom up to big iron with hundreds of CPUs worth millions of USD. With the EXACTLY the same install DVD. Now THAT is scalability. Modifiability is not scalability. Morons.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1095419
Ive seen articles were Linux is faster than Solaris. Upon closer scrutiny, they compared an ancient 800MHz SPARC vs dual core Xeon 2.67GHz Linux. Another article stated their new Linux solution is faster than their old Solaris solution. Upon closer scrutiny, their Solaris solution were 800 old SPARC servers and their new Linux solution is 3000 new Linux dual Intel Xeon servers.
Morons.
In fact, several companies tries out Linux, and when their workload increases, they find out Linux doesnt cut it anymore. They switch to Solaris:
http://lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/77-Choosing-Solaris-10-over-Lin…
Linux sucks badly as a file server:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/sans/features/article.php/374…
Linux Kernel developer Andrew Morton explains that Linux kernel is so full of bugs the quality is declining:
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
Only recently Linux has removed a barrier, it is now 250 times faster on 64 CPU systems. Wow. Linux was 250 times slower recently on 64 CPU systems. What other barriers are there? Linux have problems with scaling above 16 CPUs.
Trasz writes:
“The main disadvantage [Linux Kernel] of giant lock is that it eliminates the concurrency, thus decrease the performance on multiprocessor systems.
…
What I was talking about was synchronisation in the [Linux] kernel. What you’re talking about above is synchronisation between userland threads. Two completely unrelated things. The fact that Linux uses spinlocks is one of the reasons that its performance drops noticeably under high load on many CPUs. Other operating systems use fully functional mutexes, along with interrupt threads.
…
This was about replacing so called ‘semaphores’ (actually, Linux’ implementation of semaphores) with so called ‘mutexes’. Spin locks are still the fundamental synchronisation mechanism.”
For CDDL vs GPL, the problem with CDDL is that it allows CDDL on indvidual files. That is why Apple and BSD can lift in the ZFS source code files and use it. Whereas GPL demands that all files must be GPL, no mixing of licenses allowed. Some say that GPL is quite ego centric license. Everything revolves round GPL. No other licenses allowed. GPL is the TRUE license. Ego centric POW?
SEGEDUNUM,
As much as I am a SUN fanboy, even I know that VMware is for production and VirtualBox is not. VirtualBox is unstable – contrary to your claim. That is an ignorant claim and only FUD. As usual from your side. I would love if SUN’s VB could compete with VMware in terms of stability, but that is unfortunately not true yet. It is obvious for someone who studied hight math: VB supports lots of platforms and OSes. VMware focuses on only a few. It is easier to get a few platforms stable, than all OSes on the whole market. Obvious. Except for your intellect.
Edited 2009-03-20 09:24 UTC