“Changes are afoot within Sun’s software organization as the server maker looks to replace a veteran Java executive and is revamping its StarOffice and Solaris products. Gina Centoni, who has worked with Sun’s Java initiative for five and a half years, has left the company to work for phone software maker Openwave Systems, Sun spokeswoman Mah Goh said. Most recently, Centoni was senior director of product marketing for the Sun One initiative, the company’s highest-priority software project as it strives to catch up to Microsoft in Web services.” Read the rest of the article at ZDNews.
Solaris Upgraded; StarOffice to Gain a Fee
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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looks like sun needs better marketing
looks like sun needs a better everything
their legal department is good (too bad ms’s is better).
Why is everyone so down on Sun? I can see Linux people not liking Solaris being closed, but this site has more ex-BeOS’ers than anything. I mean, what’s the problem? Solaris is an excellent OS, very stable, very robust. Java is a great programming language that is relatively open, and is available on all platforms of note, Star/OpenOffice is a great product that is available on most platforms and is GPL’d, NetBeans has only gotten better since Sun bought them, and their hardware product line offers everything from PC-priced Blade 100s all the way up to machines that are far more powerful than most people need (and more expensive than most people can afford.)
Industry _wanted_ Sun to charge for StarOffice. Read some mainstream press, people are happy about this move. People who don’t want to shell out $100 can just use OpenOffice and have the same thing.
Since Sun opened shop 20 years ago they’ve brought great things to Unix and to computing as a whole. Overall I think Sun has contributed more to computing than most companies. (Great HW, Java, NFS, and an open processor architecture to name a few) Best of all, Sun has always stated that they _want_ healthy competitors and a diverse industry around Sun stuff. That certainly sounds better to me than _some_ software companies. I really don’t understand why people are so down on them.
Ben
hey, at least one smart person here
They say they want healthy competition because they don’t hold the largest market share, I guarantee their posistion would change if they had 95% of the desktops and a showing in severeral other areas (software, peripherals, game consoles, pda os, etc.). I never liked java because for all their talk of “platform independence” it was really just hardware independent, you had to run java apps on a java vm. combine that with the fact they care more about suing ms then doing anything lately and its a little off putting.
> They say they want healthy competition because they don’t
> hold the largest market share,
Of what? Desktop machines?
They aren’t even in that market. They own a large market share of what they do, and that’s high end servers/data management solution. And yet, you definitely don’t see them obfuscating/hiding hardware details to prevent Linux/*BSD/whatever other operating systems from running on the sparc hardware.
> I guarantee their posistion would change if they had 95%
> of the desktops and a showing in severeral other areas
> (software, peripherals, game consoles, pda os, etc.).
They are in _software_, they make _peripherals_ (what do you think a sun type X keyboard/their old optical mice/javaring/javacard are).
They sell hardware. More to the point, they sell _reliable_ hardware. I wouldn’t see how it is to their advantage to produce game consoles/pdas/other niche markets.
> I never liked java because for all their talk of
> “platform independence” it was really just hardware
> independent, you had to run java apps on a java vm.
Eh? It is platform independent. How do you create a window?
I certainly don’t make any Xlib calls myself when I programmed it, nor MFC calls. Nor do I worry about threading or if the platform supports 64-bit integers. All these are handled by the JVM. It’s platform independent in the same way perl/python/smalltalk/ruby/et al. are, it’s an interpreted language. You _should_ know it’s a misnomer the JVM is not an actual machine it’s just a bytecode interpreter [e.g. there are no general purpose registers/memory handling just local variables/an operand stack (e.g. to call a method named add you push both operands on the stack call add then get the return value off the stack)].
> combine that with the fact they care more about suing ms
> then doing anything lately and its a little off putting.
They sued MS the first time to get MS to quit marketing it’s JVM as Sun Java compatible when it was not (which is illegal – false advertising, [I always wished a bunch of Java developers would have sued instead of Sun]).
The second time sun claimed the lack of bundling as anticompetitive. I do concede it was a dumb business move, and a weak lawsuit (the second one), but it’s their money not mine.
Those are all _old_ news.
The most recent legal tussle is more of an attempt at monopoly busting. You must remember that vertical mergers are _illegal_ when you are a monopoly. That’s one of the major points of the Sherman Anti-trust act.
However, I would not call this an excessive amount of lawsuits. The _only_ weak one is the second java suit, which in my mind was more of an attempt at getting a ruling that it was anti-competitive as a precedent for their most recent case.
They own a large market share, not the large market share. If they controlled 95% of the servers/data management (I know their market share is big, but its not that big) you really think they’d continue to play nice? lol gaming a niche market, did you know gaming made more last year than hollywood or home computer software (minus the games of course)? and pdas are no longer a niche market either (they were even 2 years ago, now they’re almost as common as cell phones). Thats my point about java though, sure it can run on any hardware, which draws in developers and then what happens when sun decides to start charging to use it? And before anyone says they wouldn’t realize how much cash they could make in doing so. Your right about their suits for the most part but, they sued the first time with the goal of getting ms to remove the jvm from windows. They got what they wanted so they sued a second time (they might as well have screamed we’re retarded, make ms play nice). And lastly its not sun’s job to bust a monopoly, its the governments. Otherwise you have company A suing company B, just because A thinks B is a monopoly. As for the sherman antitrust act in particular I haven’t looked at that thing closely since government class in highschool and I’d have to double check it, but I think your wrong about it.
>what happens when sun decides to start charging to use it?
that didn’t happen yet so please don’t make speculations, because all speculations I’ve seen are intended to change the perception of the situation. you don’t speculate about open source failing and java succeding? then don’t do the opposite
Sun started charging for their “free” office suite so who knows if they’d charge for java? But it does set a precedent.