On a major visit to the UK this week, taking in customers, media briefings and other events, even including a dawn-’til-dusk day of golf with Gary Player, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has been doing his witty best to talk up his company’s long-term prospects. But, Tony Hallett asks, does his vision of vertically-integrated technology and simplified computing stack up?
Is McNealy’s Vision Realistic? The Future of Sun
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Eugenia Loli
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On competing with Red Hat, the best known distributor of Linux, McNealy even added: “With Red Hat you get the kernel, with Sun you get the app server, the directory, the portal, the integration server, the file system, the clustering…and 15,000 plus applications – and you get software indemnification. And we’ve got some hot x86 hardware now.”
I think this is a good message for SUN, and their business isn’t about to vanish, especially with the popularity of J2EE etc.
The problem is, much of the current *nix user base seems fascinated with this zero dollar price point, and may be willing to use “good enough” Linux instead of “rock solid” Solaris simply because they can download it for free.
If you fall into that category, please be aware that Sun allows many free downloads of their x86 product for non-professional work. Check their website for additional details.
Solaris makes a far better server on Sun’s hardware especially than Linux, but often linux is more than just good enough and isn’t far behind in some areas.
Also, linux distributions offer far more than the kernel, they also offer tools to easily manage your software such as YAST and probably SUSE includes about 15,000 applications on all of their cds, albeit a lot fo them are pointless and jsut for laughs likethe rolling eyes and many try to do the same thing, but still that is a lot of applications.
Sun is the Apple of servers except they don’t have a feeb le 3% market share
but you can expect well integrated software and hardware which will all work perfectly together except at a higer price because SUN can’t mass produce like Intel does for example.
Anyway, SUN’s software side seems to be very very solid and SUN seems to hav ea very clear vision, the harware side seems less so, but I hope that will change.
Since you can download Linux for free, it’s thought to be zero cost. But when you look at Red Hat’s financials they make 95% of there money on the ‘non-free AS/AW’ sales and support. Corporate and business clients don’t want free, they want support.
While techies like to tinker, businesses have, well you know, a business to run. In this marketplace Sun stacks up quite well and the ‘one neck to wring’ of McNealy’s pitch has some merit.
After next weeks Linux World I think that Sun will be in an even better position.
bill
computer is the fact.
i want new kind of computing at low/free cost.
it must superior than current windows environment.
if it isn’t, who try to do it?
LoOk mS’.NET. lOok ms’ WiN200X/Longhorn/Blacklomb
lOoK ms’ Yukon. These thinGs aren’t be abandoned.
it wEll Say it’s Reality, nOw.
—
sorry for *ad* about ms
I think another thing people forget is that SUN MAIN priority ISN’T necessarily Solaris or Linux, but toget people to use their SUN One Server Software. What they run it on doesn’t matter in the slightest. Whether they run Linux on a SUN x86 Server, or Solaris on a SPARC server or Solaris on a x86 Server, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that people are buying THEIR hardware and THEIR software.
Looking at the SUN One offering, there is everything one needs, a server for *.asp support, application servers, directory servers etc etc. Everything one needs to get their server up ‘n running in a flash.
Regarding free vs. cost. You are right on the money. People don’t buy software to tinker, they buy it as an investment into the company. The software is bought like any other piece of equipment. In the strictest sense, it is like a tractor or a truck. Management expect it to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Free does not provide that. If it costs nothing to buy but a bloody fortune to setup, has anyone actually save money? no.
If all the Linux migration is based purely on anti-Microsoft rhetoric then the chances of a stustained presence in the market place are VERY slim.
You do get the app server (JBoss), the directory (OpenLDAP), the portal (many products fit here, Zope might be a good choice), integration server (wtf is an ‘integration server’?), ok maybe linux doesn’t need an ‘integration server’, the file system (can you say XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ext3, IBM GPFS, Oracle CXFS, the list goes on and on), the clustering (OpenMOSIX, IPVS, iSCSI, ndb/LVM, filesystems mentioned above, etc. etc.) and more applications than you can shake a stick at – seen whats available on freshmeat.net lately?
And you get it for free, as built, tested and deployed by a huge community of independent users.
Now, it may be that all these things are better integrated than the ‘mix and match independent components’ approach that is prevalent in the Linux world, and if so, thats great – a real advantage of Solaris.
An offer of indemnification is indeed an advantage that a large company like Sun has, but the question of whether end users really require indemnification for their use of software products is a pretty murky area.
To paint Linux as not supporting things like clustering, portals, robust filesystems, directories and Java application servers is just a lie.
Sun and McNealy aren’t doing themselves any favours in this regard, as this ‘But we supply an integrated package’ and ‘But we’ll indemnify you because we have billions and you have nothing’ is sounding more and more like Microsoft.
To suggest that all this stuff just silently configures itself and works like magic when you install Solaris is a joke.
Pretty soon McNealy will be talking about ‘innovation’ and how Solaris’s TCO is lower than Linux, even though it costs hugely more and provides similar capabilities, because it’s not really about having software tools and the freedom to use them, its really about giving a large percentage of your revenue to Sun because.. well.. i forget exactly why that is….
i personally think that McNealy has/had lots of correct visions. JINI, JXTA, Java in general, they were all great visions. They all provided an improvement for humanity
Their problem is that their visions are first thought up and then biased in sun’s favour until they stop being all that groundbreaking.
I think that a complete solution from a single company that can run on multiple platforms should be very appealing to any company out there, however the biggest problem is the single-point-of-faulure..ala sun. It just isn’t credible enough these days for some reason.
Just random thoughts.
There’s an old saying about generals preparing to fight the last war. Studying past battles can teach you how could have won them, but the hard part is figuring out how to win future battles.
McNealy has an interesting vision, but it’s all about winning a battle between proprietary solutions. That’s what all previous IT battles have been about. He’s fighting the last war.
But the battle now is not between vendor A and vendor B, it’s between any vendor and any customer. It’s between proprietary vendor lock-in and customer-driven open solutions.
McNealy is preaching product differentiation, how his product is better than the other guy’s because it has features that no other product has. I don’t see that as a plus, but as a drawback. I will not commit my business to a feature available from only one source. That would be handing control over to my supplier.
It’s a buyer’s market now, and Sun needs to act like it. I don’t see any advantage in buying software controlled by someone whose agenda differs from mine, when I can bypass the middleman and hire programmers to modify open source code to do exactly what I need. If the software is critical to my business, then I need to control it. If it’s not critical, then I can use whatever is cheapest. In both cases, that’s likely to be free software.
Sun seems to dimly recognize some of this, as shown by the shift from selling software to leasing it. But they need to take the next step and give the software away and sell support (and hardware, of course). That strategy is working great for IBM. Trying to make software a profit center is just going to drive customers away.
No, McNealy’s vision is not realistic. That’s too bad, because Sun has many good people with great ideas. The products and support are pretty good, too. I’ve been using (and buying) Sun for years. But recently, every time McNealy or Schwartz open their mouths, they piss me off, and make me want to swear to never buy Sun ever again.
“To paint Linux as not supporting things like clustering, portals, robust filesystems, directories and Java application servers is just a lie. ”
I don’t think McNealy said that Linux doesn’t support all that. I think he said that Solaris and Sun Linux offer an “integrated” solution unlike RedHat. Yes, you can configure LDAP and Kerberos to support a domain. But guess what? You won’t know what other software it will be compatible with. You will have to write in the hooks in the LDAP with every peace of software you get. With SunOne, you’ll just have to install some software and it would automatically know what to do because it knows the LDAP structure. Want Apache to work with JBOSS with Red Hat Linux… you got to configure them to work together. Sun’s Linux distro is going to be big.
It’s encouraging to see that some of the posters are aware of the issue of centralized vendor control versus decentralized control that provides the users with a share of responsibility for their own software but is driven by quality (in the self interest of the user not the vendor).
I think that the model of centralized vendor control is too much like a dictatorship. Ultimately if you do not own your software (have control over it) than the vendor is going to take advantage of you because the vendor is driven to sell, to introduce changes, and to discontinue product lines. This results in some value, however it’s more about making money. Information technology is not really worth it if it is not designed from the inception stage as quality software that is owned (controlled) by the users.
If quality software was the goal, rather than vendor lock-in and HYPE (vague promises of the future…like this article), than we would have different technology. The technology would be more flexible (distributed in design), more accessable (the core would be free), and upgrades would be objectively based on value because the user would have a choice of whether or not to upgrade.
Has someone every tried to get Oracle 9i on their new funky x86 hardware with Solaris, like the Fire V65x? It just is not there, and, according to Oracle, it shall never come!
Which totally contradicts the press release of Scott and Larry on may 19, 2003. It seems to me that their statements not always agree with reality or what will really come.
“Which totally contradicts the press release of Scott and Larry on may 19, 2003. It seems to me that their statements not always agree with reality or what will really come.”
Err – have you *ever* seen a pressrelease that was true to its word???
Sun has no responsiblity to make their products “unbiased” towards their business interest. Even though Sun controls with all intents and purposes Java, suprisingly IBM makes more money out of it than Sun. The reason is that Java’s integration within Sun’s business receive poor planning.
I think the future is mainly free software (except very specialised apps) and paid support. Download software from mirrors and pay a subscription if you want support. The “Red Hat” model.
The hardware/software lock-in model of Apple seems the least likely way to suceed.
I think that open source software should maybe apply to the infrastructure of the software, however specializations such as add-ons and components can be commercial.
I think that is only going to work for server applications, not for home desktop users. Even so, the problem is that the money goes to the support crew, not the developers. Not all of them want to work for free you know..
The promise of a range of relatively inexpensive 64 bit blade servers from IBM using either the Opteron or their own PPC 970 chips, running Linux could put large chunks of Sun’s server line under a heavy competetive threat.
I hope Sun survives and is able to reinvent itself again to prosper in the future – the N1 initiative certainly does appear to hold promise. But McNally fails to grasp (unlike IBM) that the glue that hold the future of the computer industry together is Linux and FOSS.
What CooCooCaChoo misses <[>”Looking at the SUN One offering, there is everything one needs, a server for *.asp support, application servers, directory servers etc etc. Everything one needs to get their server up ‘n running in a flash. … Free does not provide that. If it costs nothing to buy but a bloody fortune to setup, has anyone actually save money? no. “[/i] is that one can set up LAMP solutions (which are effectively becoming the industry standard not .asp) out of the box, similarily for enterprise scale databases because othe high level of support for Linux from Oracle and IBM you can set them up without hassle and once you set them up.
i heard INQ people worry about sun,
he said ~why sun doesn’t look back the Plan 9~..
Aw hell I guess I bettter get the tags right this time
The promise of a range of relatively inexpensive 64 bit blade servers from IBM using either the Opteron or their own PPC 970 chips, running Linux could put large chunks of Sun’s server line under a heavy competetive threat.
I hope Sun survives and is able to reinvent itself again to prosper in the future – the N1 initiative certainly does appear to hold promise. But McNally fails to grasp (unlike IBM) that the glue that hold the future of the computer industry together is Linux and FOSS.
What CooCooCaChoo misses “Looking at the SUN One offering, there is everything one needs, a server for *.asp support, application servers, directory servers etc etc. Everything one needs to get their server up ‘n running in a flash. … Free does not provide that. If it costs nothing to buy but a bloody fortune to setup, has anyone actually save money? no. “ is that one can set up LAMP solutions (which are effectively becoming the industry standard not .asp) out of the box, similarily for enterprise scale databases because othe high level of support for Linux from Oracle and IBM you can set them up without hassle and once you set them up.
The reality is that Linux is replacing all the SUN box with cheaper linuxserver running on intel hardware. On our case we have replaced all windose server with linux server for several reason. All our application are J2EE, portability was no issue second we get close to 50% better performance in Linux than windows and better security.
The reason we moved from SUN to linux is due to low IT budget desicion but we had more windows server convert to linux due to performance, scalability and security. Since last year out TOC has wastely reduced moving to linux from windows. As a whole it seems windows was more expensive than sun in the long run but who would have figured that.
Yeah right.. and we converted more than 50% of out boxes from Linux to Windows. And our TOC was wastely reduced moving from Linux to Windows.
How about that? Eh..
People complain Suns HW and SW costs so much?
EHRM, just dropped by their online shop and got amazed at how little everything costs. I mean just one call and I get all that? Since my time cost about 100€ every hour, if I would find an x86 box order it then look for appropriate linux stuff and actually download or buy it and then install it, I think Sun offers me a better solution for half the price.
I think Linux zeals here are just to obsessed with the idea that once they get a job it’ll be okey they spend time updating their Linux boxes every day…. well as a decision maker I want things just to work, and every time anyone lays a finger on everything it cost money!
I think Sun has indeed a very promising future once the Linux hype (because it’s frankly just a hype) is slowly going to a death.
Nice to see you winning the fights McNealy =)
Why does everything have to be a religious Holy War? There is no “One OS to rule them all” and I must admit that if there was such a beast, it’d probably be of Windows lineage, possibly Linux lineage, and certainly NOT Commercial Unix lineage.
Part of being a good IT professional is assessing your needs and choosing the best tools for the job…sometimes this is a complete solution from Sun, sometimes it’s a custom rolled open source solution, sometimes it’s *gasp* Windows.
Personally, I would use FreeBSD for most server tasks…but I know that it is not without its limitations, for example, if I needed enterprise grade fault-tolerant database servers, I’d probably have to go with Sun as a first choice, however for basic Web serving, Sun is too expensive and complicated to make any sense at all.
And if you’re basically just serving files, intranet webpages, and corporate e-mail to a predominantly Windows driven network, well…it makes sense to put Windows on your server too.
Linux isn’t the “best”, Solaris isn’t the “best”, and Windows isn’t the “best”, one just has to decide what’s best for the job at hand.
If you fall into that category, please be aware that Sun allows many free downloads of their x86 product for non-professional work. Check their website for additional details.
No thanks. I already paid $20 for Solaris 9 x86. I won’t accept hand outs from the enemy. Sun will lose its market dominance. If I have anything to say about it.
To paint Linux as not supporting things like clustering, portals, robust filesystems, directories and Java application servers is just a lie.
Scott McNealy is going to drag that company down with him. I will do everything in my power as a sys admin to rid my environment of Sun, SCO and Microsoft products. I think we’d be doing the IT world a favor by removing these dinosaur corps, allowing all the little guys to flourish with open and free software for a change.
Don’t you think Microsoft and Sun already had their chance? As far as I’m concerned with their market dominance and excess capital, their products should be perfect. They are not.
The only reason everyone is behind RedHat is because Sun, Microsoft, SCO and the like exist. As soon as these companies fall due to free market pressure then RedHat will slowly lose its dominance, unless it can maintain a technology lead ahead of the other distros. RedHat isn’t doing very well technologically with their AS products, from my perspective, but perhaps they have something up their sleeve waiting for the 2.6 kernel release..
Don’t you think Microsoft and Sun already had their chance? As far as I’m concerned with their market dominance and excess capital, their products should be perfect. They are not.
<sarcasm>
Yup, just like my power company is perfect, because it’s a government supported monopoly.
And the US Postal Service has NEVER lost any of my mail ever, because they are likewise a government supported monopoly.
And I’ve never had to have my car in for service because it’s from Chevrolet, GM’s most popular division and GM commands the majority of all car sales, making it the equivalent of Sun in its industry.
</sarcasm>
You’re being ridiculous. Nothing is EVER perfect, I’ll admit both Sun and MS have a LOT of room to improve, but that doesn’t mean they’re not GOOD.
Your anti-corporate attitude is quite frankly retarded. Corporates put food on your table, well unless you’re on welfare.
We need Corporates to make the economy go-round, yet I still love free software, because for many things it IS the only way to go…the future will need both to fuel innovation.
Love them or hate them, we need the Sun’s, the MS’s, the Apple’s, even *gasp* the SCO’s…well maybe not them, the lawyers don’t really need any help.
“I think Sun has indeed a very promising future once the Linux hype (because it’s frankly just a hype) is slowly going to a death.”
You just don’t understand Linux works for a lot of corporate mission critical deployments now . Our windows IT shop is learning that now after being forced by the IT dept at the North American head office to deploy Oracle for our major new mission critical application on RHAS (“run it on a unixlike OS or no support”) After the odd typical Linux problem at installation – finding and installing a driver not on the Red Hat distribution – they soon had it up and running and it just worked. The IT manager responsible for the installation (Novell/Windows background) was soon boasting that if that had been allowed to bay a full Oracle RAC system on Linux they could have hosted the entire global Oracle ERP load on it and that we did not need the big Unix box at head office that was currently doing the job.
Better that Linux is slowly making its way up the enterprise IT ladder that way than Windows (if you have any commitment to Unix even if you have none for FOSS).
Linux in the enterprise is not just hype it is real and the advances in the 2.6 Kernel will tend to displace proprietary UNIX even faster. Sun needs to develop a stategy to live with that or it risks seeing its systems replaced with ones from IBM, HP and Dell running Linux.
Sun has been a great company at bringing innovation to computer systems. It’s problem is that that innovation is frequently not highly valued in the market place. Sun makes very good products, (though pricey), yet the people who hold the purse strings in companies usually could care less because they often don’t understand technology to begin with or where it actually CAN make them money.
Systems tend to be most useful in operations and infastructure, not in direct sales. Therefore it’s much harder to estimate their contribution to the bottom line.
Microsoft figured out long ago that depending on innovation to increase sales is fraught with danger. It used guile and a “legal” contract noose to lure in box builders that became insnared in the “de facto” standard. And when they realized they were caught, Microsoft had become big enough to wield a very large “stick.” Same thing with MS Office. Most business users just expect to have to reboot their computers on some regular basis. But it’s now a “lesser” hurdle than having to change software.
It’s a cliche, but as has often been said, making the best product is no guarantee of success.
“50% better performance in Linux than windows”
cough****bullshit****cough
-G
I would rather see SUN port their own OS Solaris to as many hardware platforms as possible and leave Linux alone. They are wasting energy on an OS that already has tons of ardent support from their major competitor. They should instead be trying to compete with Linux head on instead of giving them ground.
Solaris is superior right now to Linux, but how about in six months when numerous hackers getting paid nothing, and thousands upon thousands of beta testers develop the next new kernel and supporting drivers for all the new hardware out there. I don’t like the idea that Solaris will die in favor of its faster growing sibling just because it is too complacent to realize its own strengths. Yes SUN may have to lower the cost of their products, but who would be interested in an a Solaris license for $50 that runs on SPARC, PowerPC, EPIC, X86, and AMD64? I think SUN would sell Solaris like hot cakes and Linux would have some real competition.
I know many of you think that only one UNIX should exist and it should be free! – but their is only one Linux kernel, yet I doubt anyone would advocate that ALL distributions should halt and Red Hat should step in and take over Linux. The same goes for UNIX, same basic code, different versions.
I would rather SUN leave Linux alone and develop their own operating system. Then UNIX would have several major development paths, killing off all proprietary UNIX in favor of one single UNIX, “Linux” would be a very bad thing (not for you cheap short-sighted admins I guess, but for the technology itself). In order to stay innovative and competitive, there has to be competitors to compete with!
I know there are also other well written open UNIX architectures like *BSD. These UNIXes all have different development paths and ideas (like VM, filesystems, etc), having one technology subdue the others is not in the best interest of any technology area. All of these UNIXes have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, and energy should be devoted to each of them. None of these should be killed off, just so Linux can thrive to become the next generic OS.
The only other proprietary UNIX out there (SCO, Tru64, AIX, and IRIX are not going to survive Linux) is HP-UX, and it may not survive during its transition over the next few years. HP may end up just being a Microsoft only vendor running under Intel – which grudgingly supports (what they perceive as) side-show freaks that run VMS and UNIX.
Your anti-corporate attitude is quite frankly retarded.
Yes, but no less retarded than corporations anti-communist attitude. I am just commenting from the other side of the fence since our media seems to ignore it.
What is needed is intelligent discussion, which I think these forums help provide. However:
Corporates put food on your table, well unless you’re on welfare.
Since when did any corporation walk up to your house and ask to put food on your table? What world do you live on? Okay, so corporations like to sell cheap things for lots of money, moving on:
We need Corporates to make the economy go-round, yet I still love free software, because for many things it IS the only way to go…the future will need both to fuel innovation.
I’d rather this be a question. Will the future need both to fuel innovation? Hows about we let the reader decide.
There’s an old saying about generals preparing to fight the last war. Studying past battles can teach you how could have won them, but the hard part is figuring out how to win future battles.
McNealy has an interesting vision, but it’s all about winning a battle between proprietary solutions. That’s what all previous IT battles have been about. He’s fighting the last war.
But the battle now is not between vendor A and vendor B, it’s between any vendor and any customer. It’s between proprietary vendor lock-in and customer-driven open solutions.
McNealy is preaching product differentiation, how his product is better than the other guy’s because it has features that no other product has. I don’t see that as a plus, but as a drawback. I will not commit my business to a feature available from only one source. That would be handing control over to my supplier.
It’s a buyer’s market now, and Sun needs to act like it. I don’t see any advantage in buying software controlled by someone whose agenda differs from mine, when I can bypass the middleman and hire programmers to modify open source code to do exactly what I need. If the software is critical to my business, then I need to control it. If it’s not critical, then I can use whatever is cheapest. In both cases, that’s likely to be free software.
Sun seems to dimly recognize some of this, as shown by the shift from selling software to leasing it. But they need to take the next step and give the software away and sell support (and hardware, of course). That strategy is working great for IBM. Trying to make software a profit center is just going to drive customers away.
No, McNealy’s vision is not realistic. That’s too bad, because Sun has many good people with great ideas. The products and support are pretty good, too. I’ve been using (and buying) Sun for years. But recently, every time McNealy or Schwartz open their mouths, they piss me off, and make me want to swear to never buy Sun ever again.
As our planet runs out of resources, there has to be some actual value in the value chain. Not just more marketing hype and “make work” technology that is sold like snake oil.
Everything is changing all so very fast. Computers cost an incredible amount of resources to make. Soon it will be paramount for computers to deliver “value” beyond meaningless numbers on an accountant’s books.
All the big fat companies are focused on profits, not human value. Sun is no different. They are a dead company walking, not realizing that they are focusing on stuff that just doesn’t matter anymore. If there are to be companies in the new age of Earth — the resource limited age — these companies will respect human energy, time, and costs. Today there is not one major technology company that cares about anything other than their stock price and their profits.
“The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.” — Jacques Cousteau
Corporations like Sun are one form of human organization. Other forms of human organization exist, such as the Linux kernel. Does a single corporation pay for the R & D of the Linux kernel? No. Yet some people still claim that corporations are a requirement for innovation. Corporations typically think innovation can be bought, that they can pay to have an R & D department solve all their technical problems for them. It has worked very well in the past, but they don’t understand one little thing. Innovation comes from human intelligence and creativity. And money helps build a good environment to house intelligent and creative people, but it is not everything. Many people would be more creative and comfortable working in their homes, and possible more productive and innovative. Corporations still want to hold employees accountable for their hours of work and horde IP. They don’t realize that IP is not a limited resource, even thought they can be granted a monopoly. I think it is wrong of corporations to steal employee’s ideas and act is if they were their own innovations.
Corporations may be the banks and brokers of capital and ideas, but they can’t make me sign away my IP. And there are, unbelievably and possibly unfortunately, many people like me.
Actually I couldn’t agree more, I believe that we should be focused technology instead of money. I also believe that we need to understand technology and what use it has before unleashing it on the world. If people embraced a more noble cause and wanted to advance the human race, then maybe we would start moving forward.
If the US spent more on education, than maybe we would be a better democracy. An educated democracy is the only democracy that will be successful. In a democracy, intelligence is required from it’s citizens. Maybe if people could think beyond the next day or next year, people would realize that money isn’t as important as breathing air or drinking water.
Selfish greed is killing our democracy. We are nothing more than a mass of idiots voting in a bloated oligarchy that wants to wring anything and everything they can strangle, simply so they can accumalate more of whatever it is they value at the moment.
Since when did any corporation walk up to your house and ask to put food on your table? What world do you live on? Okay, so corporations like to sell cheap things for lots of money, moving on:
And since when did free software walk up to your house and ask to put food on your table?
Unless RMS or Linus helped out at a food pantry for a day
My point was that without corporations there are no jobs…name one job that isn’t at least indirectly dependent upon a Corporation or some other business entity to pay the bills?
As I said earlier, free software is great, I love some of it more than is probably healthy, but it’s not the ONLY way, and I think the all-or-nothing attitude some people, such as yourself, have totally sucks! It’s retarded to think that we could progress as a society without a cooperative mix of free and proprietary software.
Here’s a rhetorical question for all of you, where are the “enterprise-ready” features of Linux coming from?
name one job that isn’t at least indirectly dependent upon a Corporation or some other business entity to pay the bills?
Prostitute.
Prostitute.
ummm, and where does the client get their money? Oh, and same for drug dealers if someone was thinking that…where does the client get the money?
The whole discussion on the merits and faults of corporation is a bit off-topic, but I’ll add my own 0.02$.
In fact, private enterprises are not in themselves bad. In fact, certain “schools” of communist thought allow for private enterprise (Trotskyism, for example).
The problem with the corporate model is that it invariably leads to concentration of wealth, and that it is usually based on the alienation of labor from workers. I think one can be “in favor” of corporations (anyway, they’re not going anywhere), but that does not mean that one is forced to accept the classical capitalist model for such corporations. There are multiple variations, such as companies that are owned by their employees (and where managers are elected – now that would sometimes improve things, I’m certain!).
Laissez-faire capitalism and deregulation lead to markets dominated by the stronger players, who can use their power to crush the competition by locking it out of a market.
Also, transnational corporations can often leverage governments into giving them favours, often at the expense of the local population. Also, the absence (or weakness) of organized labor in most third world countries mean that such corporations can do pretty much what they want with their employee, overworking and underpaying them, and even killing them outright (re: Coca-Cola in Columbia).
One can certainly be in favor of Corporations and still want them to have ethics…
>Prostitute.
ummm, and where does the client get their money? Oh, and same for drug dealers if someone was thinking that…where does the client get the money?<
The same place corporations get it from. The government.
>”The same place corporations get it from. The government.”<
And before you can say “Where does the government get the money?”, They print it.
So Government Funded Prostitution is what all you people want, eh? Oh yeah, the drug deals should be paid for too, right? That’s probably how your corrupt minds got these thoughts to begin with.
You almost get it. What I want is the government to send me my pound of quality grade-A American Cannabis each year for all those $30k+ in taxes I am happy to pay, instead of taking away my right to possess it.
But you’re too stupid to understand a simple thing like freedom.
That is partially what this whole Linux thing is about. Freedom. The freedom of the end user to make unlimited copies or redistribute the software or look at the source code or, God forbid, modify it. Just try to get a deal like that from Sun or Microsoft and you’ll see what we’re talking about.
What I want is the government to send me my pound of quality grade-A American Cannabis each year…
Just like I predicted, that IS what you people want. It would be sad, if it wasn’t so sick.
you’re too stupid to understand a simple thing like freedom…That is partially what this whole Linux thing is about. Freedom. The freedom of the end user to make unlimited copies or redistribute the software
More personal attacks…not to mention your points are all wrong too. “Freedom” is not something you are born with son. It is something that is only provided to you by the sanctity of the United States of America. And within ALL the great freedoms the USA provides you, the right to “make unlimited copies or redistribute the software” is nowhere on that list.
You may think I’m “stupid”, but the truth is, at a minimum I understand the very most basic and simple truths of life, which you will probably spend the rest of your life without comprehension.
In the history of governments, most of them, including the US government, take away freedom from the individual, often until there is no freedom left, just tyranny.
The reason the founding fathers of America put in so many stipulations on individual rights was due to their fear of government.
The people are always supposed to act as a “check and balance” to government. That is why the people have the right to bear arms.
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
— Thomas Jefferson
The people are always supposed to act as a “check and balance” to government. That is why the people have the right to bear arms.
Here Here!
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Yes, the main role of the government should be protecting the borders, which they are doing a terrible job of, despite our military successes overseas.
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Exactly what courtrooms are made for. And history has shown, IT companies cannot be trusted.
There is one place that I would dissagree you when you are posting as Golden Eagle on Free Republic and that is when you call the GPL a foriegn license. Unfortunately this communist puppy was a HOME GROWN creation of an overweight neo hippie named Richard Stallman or more popularly RMS to his fello “hackers” right here in the USA in the people’s republic of Taxachusits. Linus Torvalds is probably using it ONLY because it reflects his European Socialist Views.
And I am glad to see that you are supporting an anti Microsoft company in this. Sun Microsystems is one of my favorites in the commercial proprietary software world as well. I use the full proprietary version of Star Office under Linux and am learning Java in case I have to give coding native code apps for managed code ones. I might even be considering Solaris for x86 as a replacement for Linux if these people don’t start cleaning up their ethical act, and particularly these jokes about “hit men” that pour out of the mouths of Torvalds and others when they don’t get their way. I find them in very poor taste and perhaps even criminal in and of themselves.
In fact in my own studies of all this. (SCO V IBM V LINUX and Inter Trust V Microsoft) I find that only Sun Microsystems and InterTrust are NOT guilty of some ethical or criminal infraction in the whole mess. Therefore when I get the money to license some DRM technology to keep the pirates’ greedy little P to P networks out of my proprietary stuff I will be considering Inter Trust first, they appear to own the technology, and NOT Microsoft.