Sun's CEO On FOSS and the Cloud

ruphus13 writes "Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz continues to promote the use of Open Source, and says the downturn in the economy will only boost the momentum behind FOSS. From his post, 'Free and open source software is sweeping across the vast majority of the Fortune 500. When you see the world's most conservative companies starting to deploy open source, you know momentum is on your side. That's creating massive opportunity for those of us who have pioneered the market, to drive commercial opportunities... We announced just last week that we're building the Sun Cloud, atop open source platforms — from ZFS and Crossbow, to MySQL and Glassfish. By building on open source, we're able to avoid proprietary storage and networking products, alongside proprietary software.'" In related news, the Sun-IBM deal proposed last week has been called "anti-competitive" by a tech industry group, while others are speculating on how it could affect Linux and Java.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[noundi]

First of all it's not something you migrate to in a heartbeat. It takes time and careful consideration. And you're right, not all benefit from it but why should they? Or more importantly, why is it bad unless the majority benefits from it? There are many businesses that would find this to be a good solution. And what goes for central storage, most larger networks often use a similair solution. I have my data on my hard drive, but trust me, if I lose my network connection my data is rendered more or less useless anyway. But the point is you don't build a cloud system and leave space for network outage. If you're very depended on it you make sure there are plan B's and C's and D's.

I agree about the downturn helping (;-))

[davecb]

As an Evil Contractor[TM], I usually find a downturn increase both

• my business, and
• my customers' interest in low-cost, medium-performance or medium-feature-set solutions.

--dave

Re:Still the Cloud?

[nine-times]

Even a watered down version of the cloud, say for storage has inherent security issues. How do you control what data goes where, who accesses it, how do you secure it, etc.

Some of that can be helped with proper implementation of encryption, if anyone actually got around to dealing with this problem in a thorough manner.

If I'm counting on some server to hold all of my data outside of my computer, then god save me if I lose my network connection

That wouldn't be so frequent if people took data infrastructure seriously, but also it can be helped by proper use of caching/syncing.

or if their servers are compromised.

That's what backups are for.

I'm not really dismissing your points, but rather trying to point out that none of these things are insurmountable. It's just that people have done a poor job of addressing your concerns up to this point.

Re:Still the Cloud?

[nine-times]

Preventing vendor lock in. Ensuring privacy of sensitive data. Neither of these is possible with any cloud computing product available.

I'm decidedly not saying that any "cloud" service currently available is perfect. I'm saying many of the problems are not inherent, but rather could be solved. For example, having fast and reliable ubiquitous Internet access isn't something that Amazon or Google could simply fix. It's an infrastructure problem, and that infrastructure can be improved greatly from its current state.

Re:no IBM plz

[Anonymous Coward]

Because only problem customers have with IBM is their prices. IBM can actually do anything you would ask them. Literally. But it will cost you a bunch ... and your kidney too.

No they can't. They will say they will for the longest time.

If you're a customer of theirs in one segment, they'll make promises about another product if you're using a competitor's version.

They'll try to give it to you for free. Waste your time trying to cobble together a solution that was easily done with your previous solution and you'll waste months to just get back where you started. All this because your manager enjoys the perks IBM gives him.

Even within IBM, there are competing technologies and they just don't know how to position them. I remember years ago when Domino was going to be the application paltform, no WebSphere, it all depended on which group you were talking to and what they thought they could sell you.

Since so much of Sun's portfolio overlaps, I see those days returning.