Sun’s Solaris – reloaded
p2pnet.net News:- In the will it or won’t it Sun Microsystems Solaris controversy, the New York Times says it will – that’s to say, Sun will “turn its proprietary operating system, Solaris, into open-source software”.
But if it’s true, has the decision come in time to save the day for Sun as Linux steadily gains ground as the OS?
The controversy arose when, at Sun’s quarterly network computing conference in Shanghai, new coo Jonathan Schwartz said Sun would do the unthinkable – “release source code from its Solaris operating system through an open-source license, the same free distribution strategy promoted by the developers of Linux,” as the NYT states it here.
And “Make no mistake, we will open-source Solaris,” COMPUTERWORLD quotes Schwartz as saying here.
But, “Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy has squashed hopes that its Java programming language could be made open source, and cast a shadow over Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz’s statement yesterday that the Solaris operating system was to go the same way,” PC Pro states here.
“At a news conference during the public sector technology showcase FOSE 2004, McNealy said he couldn’t understand how open sourcing Java would solve anything.”
The NYT’s Laurie J. Flynn, however, has no doubt about where things stand. Sun, “declined to provide details on how the move would affect the company’s overall business model, or whether the company would provide all or only parts of the source code through an open-source license,” she writes. “Sun has always held tight control over Solaris, its proprietary network operating system for server computers.
And she quotes Eric A. Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, as saying Sun’s proprietary approach, “landed it in this hole. Solaris’s high price and closed-source nature directly led to the development of Linux.”
“Over the last few years, Sun has lost a considerable amount of market share in the server market to computers running Linux and Windows, which are often less expensive than the kind of specialized hardware and software sold by Sun,” says Flynn.
“The impact of Sun’s decision, the apparent result of many months of spirited debate inside the company, will depend on just how far Sun decides to take the new approach, say analysts.”
Nor does computer science student Michael Klein wonder which route Sun should take.
In his open letter to Sun on OS News here he says:
“If you don’t open-source Java, Microsoft will have the upper hand in both Windows and Linux software. That’s because right now, Mono is allowing developers to write for .NET and Linux simultaneously. I’m not sure how closely you or Sun has been following the debate (I would hope very closely, considering the vested interest in Linux and OpenOffice that Sun has), but basically it comes down to whether to use .NET or Java as the next-generation infrastructure of Linux’s Gnome desktop environment (as well as core applications and eventually KDE as well). If the Ximian team has their way, Microsoft’s .NET will win out, and regardless of whether Microsoft ends up charging licensing fees, they will hold control over Linux’s next-generation development platform.”
The reality is probably that Sun will indeed turn Solaris loose and Schwartz’s announcement merely jumped the gun.
But as Flynn’s story concludes, “given Linux’s success, Sun’s decision may have come too late”.
June 5th, 2004 at 6:08 pm
It’s amazing that financial analysts are making decisions which affect my job (yes I work for Sun) based on such utter nonsense. I’ll start with Eric A. Raymond’s quote that Sun’s proprietary approach, “landed it in this hole. Solaris’s high price and closed-source nature directly led to the development of Linux.” In the late 1990s, I purchased Solaris 2.6 for $25. When sold with Sun hardware, Solaris has almost always been free. Compare this to the price of Windows XP or the latest Red Hat distribution? Sun’s StarOffice is less than 1/4 the cost of Microsoft Office. Sun’s Java Desktop is less expensive than most commercial linux distributions and much less expensive than Microsoft Windows. Compare the cost of Sun’s Java and developer tools to something like Microsoft Visual studio. Yes Linux can run a web server and MS Windows can run the latest game, but as an engineer who has worked with all three OS’s, I’m amazed that business’s fail to value the scalability, security, support and interoperability that Solaris provides.
If you don’t know anything about Sun Ray, trusted Solaris, Dtrace, hot swappable CPUs, load balanced clusters, zones… then you don’t know what you are missing.
June 6th, 2004 at 2:47 am
Well, how objective you must be as a Sun employee. You see, I too have worked with all three OSes, but unlike you, I don’t work for Sun. I am an objective consultant with 12 years of experience in IT, including working on military networks which used HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Novell, and Windows. However, for small to medium size businesses (SMBs), do you know what? Never once have any of them asked for or had the requirements for “Sun Ray, trusted Solaris, Dtrace, hot swappable CPUs, load balanced clusters, zones” as you say. To that [SMB] market Sun has nothing in their otherwise outdated Solaris operating system to offer that these customers can’t find in Linux. You say that you are amazed that businesses fail to value the scalability (for SMB’s linux is scaleable enough), security (what’s not secure about Linux compared to Solaris?), support (Linux has better support than anything Sun has ever made available to me as a consultant – or even direct for the SMB customer), and Interoperability (Linux runs on more platforms than Solaris will probably ever run on), so you might assume I am a linux biggot. Wrong – just offer the best value for the money to my clients. Sometimes it’s M$ small business server, most times it’s a Linux box. But to date and after hundreds of clients in the SMB sector – it has and probably will never be Solaris (or java desktop system) for that matter. Sorry.
Also, you mention “When sold with Sun hardware, Solaris has almost always been free” which hilariously reminds me of the Ford commercial regarding the Focus and a Dell! You’re paying for it one way or another! Hello! Your seeming naivity is amazing.
June 6th, 2004 at 7:02 pm
well said, I think it’ll all be moot anyways in a few years, Sun probably won’t be around anymore if current trends are any indicator – or alliances
June 7th, 2004 at 2:11 pm
>>Well, how objective you must be as a Sun employee.
>>You see, I too have worked with all three OSes, but unlike you, I don’t work for >>Sun. I am an objective consultant with 12 years of experience in IT,
I have also worked for more than 15 years in these industries; as a consultant, software engineer and analyst before choosing to work for Sun. I don’t hide the fact that I am a Sun employee, but please don’t claim objectivity unless you know Sun’s current products. Are you aware that Sun sells x86 hardware that is price competitive with Dell? Are you aware the Sun sells a GNU/linux distribution that is price competitive with Red Hat? If not, it may mean that Sun has not been communicating effectively to consultants such as yourself, but it certainly does not mean that Sun doesn’t have a place in SMBs. Your clients may not have asked for “SunRay” but how many . Your clients may not have asked for “Trusted Solaris” or “Zones”, but can you honestly tell me that none of them have lost time or money because of malware or a security issue? They may not have asked for Dtrace, but how many times could you have used a system wide debugger? Section 9 of this article points out how Sun’s tool was used to find a piece of poorly written code that escaped many open source eyes and found it’s way into nearly every recent linux distribution.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/dtrace_usenix.pdf
Interoperability? Yes, Linux runs on many platforms but Java runs on many more. Interoperability can also mean things like adhering to a published network protocol. Does your favorite linux distribution have solid support for DHCP, IPv6, NIS+, LDAP, and NFS?
I’ve never understood this “Sun vs Linux” thing. It’s almost like saying “Ford vs Firestone.” They are complementary OS’s and to assume that Solaris has no place is as naeve as to assume that Linux or MS Windows have no place. In 1996 I installed Slackware on a 486 and found it to be faster at running Java code than Microsoft Windows 95 on the same machine. The linux kernel currently supports more exotic hardware than Solaris. When most people speak of Linux, they are not just referring to Linus’s kernel, they are referring to the whole GNU stack that makes up a distribution. Sun has contributed to this stack for years. We haven’t been involved with the linux kernel because we already have a better one. You can choose to believe it isn’t better, but you should be sure of yourself, because someday another consultant may outbid you with a lower cost, more secure, higher performance solution that doesn’t disregard Sun products.
Note:I’m an engineer, not a marketing person, the above is my personal technical opinion.
June 10th, 2004 at 9:39 am
“They are complementary OS’s” … ok… What is this psycho babble? They aren’t complimentary – complimentary might mean they work together to solve different parts of the same problem. In most cases they can independently do this. They aren’t complimentary – they are competitors in the entry level market.
Also, you tried this line: “how many times could you have used a system wide debugger?” to which I say – NEVER. Then the link championing Sun’s Dtrace again. Wonderful tool, but lots of companies have wonderful tools besides Sun for Linux. IBM has released tons, so have HP, Dell, and jillions of others, but riddle me this Batman: Why is Sun even contributing to Linux if they have a one size fits all in Solaris they are so confident in? Hey it runs on x86, Sparc – what the heck? Why even bother with Linux? Here’s the fact: java may be more portable than Linux in theory, but java is not an OS. BTW, let’s define a platform. Since you claim java runs on more platforms than Linux we should define ‘platform’. Platform is a hardware plus OS combination that applications can run on top of. Java is effectively an application and therefore, it needs an OS as portable as itself to run on and guess what? That OS is not windows, not solaris, and not Mac OS X. It’s Linux – maybe embedded linux, but its still most likely linux. Oh, you probably meant, you could have a JVM running on my x86 windows machine or my x86 linux machine, or my x86 BSD box, or… yeah… when the hardware belying the OS doesn’t change, you’re not on a completely different platform.
So to clarify the confusion you seem to have over the “Sun vs Linux” thing it boils down to the fact that sun is more vested in Solaris and their own hardware than it makes sense to be today and they happen to be in the unfortunate position of trying to do 1980’s IT margins in 2004 and linux is kicking their butt and for good reason. It is lower TCO than Slowlaris, and it provides a secure alternative to windows virii and spyware problems, it performs adequately, and basically does it’s job reliably.
I will agree here: Sun has the better OS kernel – they should. Especially if by better you mean bloated with 30 years of legacy baggage it still carries around. They have charged enough money and spent enough on R & D over the years to have that claim. However, the question isn’t which OS has the best kernel. It is which one has the better price tag on the overall solution (enter M$ into desktop computers 20 years ago).
June 10th, 2004 at 10:01 pm
No, I’m not confused. By complimentary I meant that linux has a place, as does MS Windows and Solaris.
<br>Look, anyone can put together a GNU/linux distribution. Sun can certainly do this but right now the margins are such that it makes more sense to put our software stack on another distribution.
Sun’s 20 years of unix expertise gives it a clear advantage in the linux world. After all, linux is simply a flavor of unix. Sun already has solutions far beyond anything our competition offers but we continue to invest in R & D because that is where we shine. The reason Sun contributes to GNU/linux is that most of what we contribute to Accessibility, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, JXTA, Mozilla… will help our Solaris customers as well as customers of our Java Desktop System.<br>
<br>
Anyone can buy x86 hardware put it in a pretty box and call it a 1U server. When our customers ask us to do that, we do it. We’re new to the low margin stuff, but we’re certainly not afraid of it, and we can compete there: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/
<br>
Anyone can make an office suite, though a certain company has leveraged its monopoly is such a way that few are aware that Microsoft Office isn’t the only solution, and it isn’t necessarily the best solution. When our customers ask us for an office suite, we can provide StarOffice, a cost effective office suite that can save documents in an open XML format.
<br>
So Sun can do what Red Hat does, it can do what Dell does and it can do what Microsoft does. But wait, there’s more
I won’t bother arguing whether JVM is a platform, an API, a library, an O.S., or an african swallow. Application developers don’t care. Application users shouldn’t care.
<br>It sounds like you’ve made up your mind and there is nothing I could say that could influence you, but Sun is a big company with many capabilities. Yes, parts of the company will shrink over the next few years and others will grow. Perhaps you work in a market that is narrow enough that Sun will never provide a solution that fits your exact needs, but it’s a big world out there. Don’t write us off yet!
June 10th, 2004 at 11:54 pm
One of the other undervalued capabilities of Sun is their long experience and expertise in internet protocols and infrastructure. For example, many linux distributions do not handle DHCP client caches or NFS locks correctly. Solaris does.
Sun has made mistakes. Solaris X86 was called a linux killer a couple of years ago but this was exactly when people in Sun management, who didn’t understand the strengths of Solaris, decided to drop it for a while. The “Slowlaris” myth comes from those who only know Solaris on outdated, underclocked and memory deficient single CPU Sparcstations.
Keep an eye open for Solaris 10 benchmarks. I could give you links to internal benchmarks which show Solaris 10 beta more than 20% faster than linux when running the same webserver (Apache or Sun) on the same hardware. But it will be much more impressive when an independent benchmark reveals what I already know
June 14th, 2004 at 6:25 am
Well put. Thanks for the info and head-up on Solaris 10. FYI, I don’t dislike sun’s solutions at all personally in case I gave the wrong impression in earlier comments. My point simply being that sun has the “expensive high margin” stigma about them, the way micosoft has the “security prone and bug ridden” stigma about them. Since stigmas are tough to shake, especially in the SMB market, that makes Sun a tough sell, for better or for worse. All I am saying in that case, is that for those tough Sun hardware or Solaris sales, Linux is a respectable alternative – if not the best alternative in some cases.