Although Sun Microsystems Inc. discontinued sales several months ago of its customized Linux distribution, the company hasn’t entirely abandoned its do-it-yourself Linux strategy: In its forthcoming bundle of desktop software, code-named Mad Hatter, the included Linux OS will be Sun’s own.
Sun’s Linux: Not Dead After All
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Will this work on any plain vanilla x86? Kernel 2.6? And will it have a cool SUN logo when loading up GNOME? I’ll buy that.
In the article is the fact that Sun is consolodating everything down to five software product lines each updated quarterly and licensed per employee. I suppose they are targetting companies wary of paying three times over for Windows and Office on corporate networks.
Sun is also targeting office desktops but without the smell of proprietary file formats (OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, Mozilla, GNOME, etc.). Between Sun and Apple, we can hope the Monopoly’s foundation starts sinking.
“Between Sun and Apple, we can hope the Monopoly’s foundation starts sinking.”
I forgot to mention that IBM and even little guys like Lindows are all helping increase mind-share away from the free-market dictatorship most companies find themselves under. I hope the next five years are very reassuring.
“Between Sun and Apple, we can hope the Monopoly’s foundation starts sinking.”
Absolutely! Thanks to their 2.5% market share of the desktop OS, Apple and Sun really are becoming an increasingly visible menace to Microsoft. M$ stock holders better cash in now before it is too late…
Didn’t they just say LInux was illegal a few months ago?
“Thanks to their 2.5% market share of the desktop OS, Apple and Sun really are becoming an increasingly visible menace to Microsoft.”
I know the business world is extremely unhealthy, right now, but it seems that 2.5% can only go up. If it manages to drop to 0%, then that is officially the end of the free market democratic republic we lovingly call the U.S.A. I personally don’t want this on the 2008 ballot: “Canidate A: Bill Gates; Canidate B: Steve Ballmer; Canidate C: Bill Gates….”
I know the business world is extremely unhealthy, right now, but it seems that 2.5% can only go up. If it manages to drop to 0%, then that is officially the end of the free market democratic republic we lovingly call the U.S.A. I personally don’t want this on the 2008 ballot: “Canidate A: Bill Gates; Canidate B: Steve Ballmer; Canidate C: Bill Gates….”
Riiiight, because cornering an entire market automatically gives you control of the federal government too.
My prediction, this is basically going to prevent some slippage for Sun shops that need some cheap upgrades, but want to stay with the Sun brand. Don’t expect to many new Sun customers from the Mad Hatter project. (Why not just use stock Red Hat instead?)
“Riiiight, because cornering an entire market automatically gives you control of the federal government too.”
No, cornering the entire market of personal and business computing is merely the first step. It is critically important that software like OpenOffice.org become ubiquitous, so that the people can truly own their own data and be free from extortion by any single corporation.
“Why not just use stock Red Hat instead?”
Sun can provide an end-to-end tested platform based to a great extent on open standards. That is part of their “value proposition.” Red Hat is less equipped to handle everything from the tech support desktop computer to the payroll database for an entire company. Simply, Red Hat and Sun cater to different markets (with non-trivial overlap, of course).
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Riiiight, because cornering an entire market automatically gives you control of the federal government too.
>
You mean like the RIAA? Hmmm….how many senators do they own? You think MS is any better?
SCO and SUNW both distribute Linux, and both hate linux. Because Linux is now enterprise level, and linux competes with their proprietary products.
Sun was secretly funding the SCO lawsuit and anti-Linux FUD campaign. Unlike msft, sunw insisted on keeping their contributions secret for as long as possible. Sunw has said they were buying drivers from scox, but since when do drivers come with a boat load of scox option for $1.83 each? Sun has profited very nicely from scox’s fud campaign.
Sun like Linux when Linux competes with windows on the desktop. When Linux is an enterprise level OS, marketed by IBM, and capable of competing with Solaris – then sunw *hates* linux. Sun is fearful and unhappy about linux’s progress. And Sun is doing all they can to kill Linux.
Actually, Sun is playing it double. They are more interested to keep their status as a traditional heavy weight UNIX (something that the coming of Linux is undermining) and on the same time they are keeping a Linux project as a backup in case their market goes 100% Linux, so they would need to still have a piece of the cake. Their Linux project is also a strategy to keep existing customers who want to move to Linux. Sun gets back to them and says “no reason to leave our services, we have Linux for you”!.
“Actually, Sun is playing it double”
ELQ is spot on Sun is suffing from an acute case osf schizophrenia. This is particularily evident in McNallys pronouncements – maybe he is suffering psychological trauma from wearing a penguin suit on stage.
But seriously the Mad Hatter project does offer a lot of hope for both Sun and desktop Linux. So they may only sell it to existing Sun shops, but there are an aweful lot of Sun shops out there serving a mass Windows clients. Their Unix orientated CIO’s would like to find a way of eliminating the despised MS Windows and save money at the same time. Sun have some pretty large companies showing interest in this as an option like Telstra in Oz.
I don’t know why people just love to bash Sun. Sun is an awesome company based on a combination of opensource and open standard solutions. They’ve contributed a lot to open source projects (ex. netbeans, mozilla, open office, and gnome.) Also, heres a newsflash for everyone, Sun doesn’t make much money by selling their OS… they make money selling their hardware. So go ahead and bash Sun, ridicule Solaris and SPARC. But please remember to also state the technical problems with them because as far as I know, they have really great products.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1205953,00.asp
SCO and SUN seem determined to bet their companies over this lawsuit. With Sun’s 5 Billion in the bank, expect the Linux FUD to continue indefinitely, that is unless you buy a ‘legal’ copy from either them or SCO. I for one support their motives, which on the surface appear to be nothing more than legitimate request for proper payment for use of their technology.
Maybe Sun’s next move will be to buy out InterTrust and you will have to go to them for LEGAL WINDOWS XP as well. If you will only look at this:
http://www.intertrust.com/main/ip/litigation.html
you will find out that you are now in the same boat as us Linux users. This little Intellectual Property Theft has infected MICROSOFT’S ENTIRE CURRENT AND PROPOSED PRODUCT LINE.
And by the way are you the guy who posts as Golden Eagle or
Bush 2000 on Free Republic. You do tend to sound like one of those two when Linux rather than political matters are being discussed there.
>>Sun is an awesome company based on a combination of opensource and open standard solutions.<<
There is nothing “open” about solaris, and if sun has it’s way, there will be nothing open about linux:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1205953,00.asp
Sun is 100% behind SCO anti-linux FUD efforts.
Not sure what is so “awsome” about Sun. Have you taken a look at their financials lately? How about Sun’s performance in the stock market? I think Sun is losing money, and losing market share. Linux is hurting proprietary UNIX, and some proprietary UNIX vendors (SCO and Sun) are fighting back – in a nasty underhanded way.
Linux is no where near ready to live in “enterprise” space. What is your definition anyway? Do you think that RedHat has singe handedly re-engineered every 3rd party piece of software that is distributed with their version of Linux? Sun on the other hand has built their UNIX (from userland utilities to SUN specific programs) from the ground up. Their are no inconcsistencies, the product feels solid and all of the parts seem to be better integrated.
Linux still feels like a thousand different pieces rounded-up into an operating system, it “feels” unstable (not saying it is, it just feels like a giant puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together right.) Further, when you have so many people modifying and contributing and constantly updating don’t you think that their will be parts that get broken because people simply can’t keep track of everything? Sure RedHat does their own coding and QA testing, but at the same time… how much do they actualy know about *ALL* of the software they are distributing?
I am not saying SUN doesn’t have a ton of 3rd party applications, but at least their distributions are better controlled and all of the core pieces are coherently designed by a team of engineers.
And there will always be you lovely LINUX zealots that think that your OS OWNZ every other operating system out there because it is the mightly Linux. A thesis project from a programmer, not meant to be an enterprise level OS. It started out as a hobby OS and it is still there.
I know, you are now crying “what! you are crazy, it scales to 16 processors, deals with huge amounts of memory and is 64 bit, has an O(1) scheduler (how many of you actually know what that means, and btw Solaris has had this for a long time), blah, blah, blah) Who cares, you want every UNIX out there to die but LINUX… of course you will say… that is good, than they can take on the evil Microsoft Corporation…
Yes, the same company that made XENIX… an x86 version of UNIX before NT was even developed. Yes, they are crazy jerks… that make the fastest OS out there with full GUI support and is pretty stable and pretty freakin’ scalable. NO, MS isn’t perfect…they release products too fast with the idea that they will improve them after a gold release that is actually a huge beta test until SP1, but at least they move forward. Every other OS out there (you know actually being used) is just another UNIX (even though they claim not to be), yes even MacOSX.
So as far as UNIX is concerned, it makes sense to have a few competing technologies that allow UNIX to grow in different directions an evolve. If LINUX was the only UNIX out there, they would have a lot less innovation! Plus, LINUX is an open source model… and in my opinion this has its own faults… (I know, I am a troll, blah, blah, blah) But think about it, their is a much different model in propriety development…I feel it is more coherent and internal testing is inherently better, plus they can develop technology and actually get paid. (now I know this is hard for you freaky zealots to believe, but programmers do need to get paid.)
>>Linux is no where near ready to live in “enterprise” space. What is your definition anyway?<<
Linux is being used on very high-end IBM servers. Linux also runs some of the world’s most powerful super-computers. What is *your* definition anyway?
>>Sun on the other hand has built their UNIX. . from the ground up<<
Wrong. Sun bought UNIX from AT&T. Then ripped off a lot of BSD.
>>Linux still feels like a thousand different pieces rounded-up into an operating system<<
This is different from UNIX in what way? Are you familiar with the history of UNIX?
>>A thesis project from a programmer, not meant to be an enterprise level OS<<
UNIX also started out as a hobby OS. UNIX was first developed as an OS to play games on.
>>It started out as a hobby OS and it is still there. <<
Does IBM know that? How about the people that buy high-end IBM Linux servers?
>>Who cares, you want every UNIX out there to die but LINUX<<
Linux is *not* a UNIX. I think you may be a little confussed about the facts here.
>>Every other OS out there (you know actually being used) is just another UNIX (even though they claim not to be), yes even MacOSX. <<
Wrong, yet again. Linux is not a UNIX.
>>If LINUX was the only UNIX out there, they would have a lot less innovation!<<
3rd time: Linux isn’t a UNIX. Do you know what GNU stands for?
Yes, Linux *IS* UNIX… it behaves the same way, has the same philosophy – everything is a file, same file structure (inodes, jfs, etc), layout, algorithms, data structures, ideas … you are too stuck on semantics… your term for UNIX is simply something that it is legally certified as UNIX, but UNIX it still is. A rose by any other name, is still a rose.
Yes, UNIX has been developed and contributed to by everyone and their dog, but Linux is still more of a hodgepodge mess than anything else out there simply because there are two million different distributions, all using different utilities, their own versions of glibc, etc. My beef isn’t the kernel (well to a lesser extent it is, but since 2.4 and how with 2.6 – once stable – satisfies some of it) it is the utilities from that point forward. RedHat is going to have a hard time keeping up with Joe somebody’s newest release of this utility that works with this package, etc. And this is why RedHats actual server releases are far behind their consumer releases, they just aren’t stable… UNIX is still ahead on usability and stability (as well as features.)
Just because IBM is using Linux doesn’t mean that it is better than AIX, in fact publicly accessible documnets from IBM from this year would state it is immature in comparison to AIX. AIX is more advanced than Linux for the time being, they are just hedging their bet that a bunch of morons that are going to go with Linux cause it’s free… never mind supporting the damned mess that it is… that is what Red Hat is for… (IBM recommends SUSE, then RedHat.)
Linux is just an annoyance to me, it is more difficult to use, breaks often, you are forced to search out the correct versions of god knows what package and pray that it doesn’t create some new incompatability, but easy to fix once you reference the two million different web sources out there including people that have NO idea what they are talking about, so simple, gee. Rather than having it never break in the freaking first place… a tinkerers OS. Oh, or you can have a support contract with RedHat and you can call their not so smart tech support (maybe just the few techs I talked to who contradicted one another) for help.
I should know, I tried to use RedHat on my PowerPC systems and some x86 systems. AIX is hands down MUCH, MUCH easier to administer and also faster (btw) and FreeBSD is a hell-of-alot easier and more stable than Linux. I can run NATIVE versions of most software already with a re-compile, they (IBM) are just switching over to Linux for binary compatability and so the plethora of “devotees” out there can embrace their favorite hobby OS, Linux.
Oh and on a side note, software companies are going to start making sure everything is “RedHat” compatibile, soon it won’t make sense to even have other distributions, their importance will soon become negligible. Maybe then RedHat will be able to control better their distribution of Linux, but then it will have a much heavier influence from industry, it will move MUCH slower just like every other OS out there when companies are frightened to death that thousands of users are going to scream when they can’t get email for two minutes. Then the hobby nature (open source) of the OS will beomce less apparent. And no fork at that point will help you (save a miralce.) So it WILL BE just another UNIX, so what is the point when other things are ALREADY ahead of it in terms of development? Linus will still develop the kernel, but who cares when their is only one supported distribution for any one that is taking Linux in “enterprise” seriously.
Further, imo “enterprise” and research universities are not synonymous, these schools that use Linux with some simulation program written to specific cluster APIs that visualize a seismic disturbance doesn’t cut it in my book. Oracle has written specific software and so have others, but this is almost a contract between one program (Oracle) and the kernel… and as long as neither of these applications crash, then you are “stable.” I am sure Oracle isn’t going to be using too many of those packages (sometimes currently unmaintained), rather they will be using pure system calls to the kernel and specific kernel modules and certain other applications when they absolutely have to! Furthermore, how new is jfs and RAID support on Linux? How many of the millions of free software packages use other packages which use other packages?
If you want a good free OS, go with FreeBSD, one release, one distribution, heavily tested, much easier administration, less headaches, period. A stable branch, and a current branch… and if you want portability how about NetBSD… Oh, and these too are yet another UNIX… since Berkley basically made most of UNIX what UNIX is…
Its called competition, BFG, deal with it!
There’s no need to make excuses for Sun or Microsoft any longer. The free markets will take care of that for us. You see, they had their chance to be nicer to the consumer, and they blew it. Now it is Linux’s turn. In fact, now it is everyone’s turn. And noone has the advantage, unless, of course, they have an intellectual advantage.
Got a problem with that?
>>Yes, Linux *IS* UNIX<<
Wrong. Linux is *not* UNIX. Different code base = different OS. If you are going to claim otherwise, please cite a reliable source.
>>Just because IBM is using Linux doesn’t mean that it is better than AIX<<
The fact that IBM is using Linux on high-end servers, does mean that Linux is enterprise capable.
>>If you want a good free OS, go with FreeBSD<<
I have no problem with your opinions, but please stop confussing your opinions and prefernces with the facts.
If I wrote code that acted just like MS Windows 2000, then am I not emulating that Operating System to such an extent that it doesn’t matter a damn bit if the code is different if it does EXACTLY the same thing. I don’t care that Linux has a different code base, big deal. What is important is that it is just another UNIX. It acts like UNIX in every way, in what way is Linux unique???
BSD developed TCP/IP and a good number of the more commonly used userland utilities… they may not have the copyright for UNIX, but calling BSD anything but UNIX is crazy! UNIX is more of a TYPE of operating system than a concrete thing… after all UNIX can be applied to Solaris as well as AIX and SCO Unixware crap.
For all that it’s worth, I still think Sun is better than Microsoft. I have several Sun boxen, currently I’m running SuSE 7.3 on my dual 400mhz Ultra Enterprise 2 with 640 megs of ram. It runs fine except the sound server locks up when you attempt to play system sounds. If Sun sells their version of Linux for the UltraSPARC II I’ll buy it. But for full hardware support, I still prefer Solaris….