Sun Banks On Open Source For Its Survival 211
CWmike writes "In moving to cut its current workforce by between 15% and 18% today, Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife. And today's announcement made it clear that Sun officials are banking on the company's open-source strategy to help it pull through. A cut of up to 6,000 employees at Sun will hurt, but CEO Jonathan Schwartz contends users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun's GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress."
Reader Barence also pointed out that Sun will begin to auction "branding space" in OpenOffice.
No f**ing way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Schwartz needs to stop believing in the Mel Brooks idea of "the Schwartz be with you". This is not a Mel Brooks movie.
Sun needs market share. And they will never get it if this is the way they want to roll.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Insightful)
On or alongside? Obviously nobody would go for any free service that inserts ads INTO their business documents, but I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing. It's never once bothered me in Gmail, and I honestly don't even know if they're present in GDocs. Neither is Sun's product of course, but Google seems to be doing quite well by, at it's core, providing free products to people.
Something tells me that I'd find it significantly more distracting in OpenOffice, but that's probably more due to its interface being more than cluttered enough already. I'm sure part of it is that we're used to seeing ads in a browser window but nowhere else; I think the bigger issue is that giant stupid flashing banners that some people try using to monetize their freeware is hugely distracting to the point where it makes the product harder to use. OO is a respectable piece of competition for MSOffice for 99% of users, but after having been spoiled by the interface in Apple's $80 iWork08 suite, OO is never something I'd pay for given its paid competition. If they could revamp it with a clean interface and wanted to put a narrow strip of text ads at the top for unpaid users, I suppose that's an option.
It's a bad position to be in - right now, OpenOffice is just burning money, it's not easily monetized through advertising (probably ineffective, lower acceptance, too small of an audience), and it probably wouldn't stand a chance of competing as paid software. Even if it was $10 at Best Buy and still free for download (identical versions, you're paying for the CD and distribution basically), people are so tuned into "Microsoft(R) Office[TM]" as their office suite that it would just get ignored in stores.
MySQL at least seems to have a business model behind it, and one that's at least not losing money even if it's not immensely profitable (I have no idea what the numbers look like, but it can't be bringing in a ton or else they wouldn't be having these issues).
Actually (Score:2)
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I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing.
Except when you have a mobile dial-up, and you get 3 Gb a month. Then, anything that tries to download anything I didn't tell it to gets deleted, fast. Like MSN Messenger.
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.
Strip away the add revenues from Google search and how much is left? When consumer sales hit bottom what happens to Google?
More OpenOffice please (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat? Novell? CANONICAL?? You've got to saturate this project with developers. Without it, desktop Linux is dead in the water. And yes, desktop Linux is real, today, despite what detractors say. Take that away and Linux slowly sinks in other areas too.
And I agree with whoever suggested that they need to get the product out in front of more Joe Sixpak types. Press a bunch of CD's and hand them out like candy. It worked for AOL back in the day. We've got to get to a point where everyone's got "one of those OpenOffice CD's" lying around, so when they need to get a document together in the middle of the night and they don't have the time, inclination, or source media to get an MS Office install together, the little light bulb comes on over their head, they toss in the OpenOffice CD, and we have one more user.
And of course the preload market needs to be saturated with OpenOffice. Every new PC needs to have a copy of OpenOffice preloaded. As the price of computers continues to come down, this could be the key to keeping that price point down. I'm sure Microsoft is really going to turn the screws on this one, but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
For 90% of the users out there, OpenOffice is MS Office's equal. It's time to really push push push to get it out in front of them.
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> ..but if a few PC manufacturers are bold enough to do it, this could be the pivotal moment for that.
Sorry, that isn't being bold. Taking a cattle prod to Microsoft isn't bravery, more like suicide. And preloading OO.o is exactly that, you would be directly threatening their biggest cash cow. Do it and you will find yourself buying your OWM copies of Windows from Ingram Micro at rack rate, which is intended to be a price to kill any OEM doing more than a couple hundred units a month. If you can't ne
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This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).
I'm not sure throwing more man hours at OpenOffice is really the solution. In my opinion, Microsoft Office is at its core poorly designed, and poorly executed. OOo strives to be an MS Office replacement, but even if it manages to do everything MS Office does better and faster, it will still be mediocre.
This is a little off topic, but what I think we really need is an open standard for office program integration so that one group can make a spreadsheet, another can make a wordprocessor, and you can be guar
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Yeah, but since OO is open source, why would anybody download the version with adds? I mean they're going to have to make some huge improvements on the "ad-supported" version to make it better than the open source version, and there's nothing to stop the open source version from catching up in a couple months anyway.
I don't get it.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly not a smart move with Novell doing their repackage with Go-oo, and IBM basing Lotus off an earlier version. I can just see the users flocking in droves to either of those two suites now. This is Novell's chance to basically steal OpenOffice.org right out of Sun's hands. I'm not sure if Novell would handle it well, but they can hardly do worse than Sun, from what I've heard about their management of OO.o.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun's management of both OpenOffice [oooforum.org] and Java [java.net] is lousy. They don't listen to their users -- the Java bug-tracking and voting system is bogus, and OpenOffice is "primitive".
Read the threads linked to above to get an idea of Sun's utter cluelessness.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Somewhere along the line the engineers making cool things were replaced by "Process Black-Belts" who spend all their time talking about "six sigma" and making engineers fill out reams of paperwork to make the smallest change to an existing product, never-mind innovating on something new and cool that the market might want.
Well now Google is the one in the industry making cool things and Sun is competing against IBM with its products. IBM doesn't waste time with Six-Sigma process people. They focus on the customer and build what the customer wants. When you're competing against IBM the problem is that your customers realize that IBM is most likely still going to be here in 20 years and your company most likely is not.
Sun could reverse this process by starting to make cool things again and trusting that if they build it the market will come. I don't really see that happening, though. They'll probably fire all their engineers and keep all their process people, which is exactly the reverse of what they should be doing.
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ZFS, dtrace, zones, Solaris Cluster, xen, java, and MySQL aren't "cool things?"
Sun is one of the biggest open source companies around even if their OS isn't the most popular. I know if it wasn't for SXCE and OpenSolaris I wouldn't be using Sun products at all, it's great to have the free versions to learn on and you can just add a support contract later if you want it.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Insightful)
I could be wrong of course! But what you are suggesting is sooooo off-the-scale-dumb that really can't see that being what they meant!
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> I _think_ they meant assisting companies that was to brand the office product, so if say
> Dell wanted to pre-load an office suite, they could install a Dell branded Star-Office or OOo.
They would certainly do that, but as I just noted in a post above, there will be no OEM preloading of OO.o because Microsoft would destroy anyone who attacked it in such a direct way. Simply forcing them to buy Windows at the retail OEM rates would be more than enough to do it and 100% legal. So that's off the table.
Re:No f**ing way. (Score:5, Informative)
there is no way -- I mean NO WAY -- that I will accept advertising on my business documents.
That is not even close to what Schwartz is planning. In his blog he compares how Sun gets paid for the optional bundling of the Google Search Bar with the Java installer. He then goes on to say that he plans on selling that kind of 'space' to other companies. He makes the point that Sun distributed 60 million java runtimes last MONTH - that is a lot of eyeballs to advertise to and that's what he as apparently monetized even further with microsoft in addition to or instead of google.
As for similar bundling with OpenOffice, he's talking about including links (not just URLs) to services, similar to the Google searchbar - e.g. fax services, place kinkos for bulk printing, sign printing, cloud-based document storage, and database hosting, etc. It is the same thing we are used to with free software, the software is one a time cost so make it free once its paid for, but the individual, optional but useful services around the software have ongoing costs so use them as a source of income.
You won't have to use any of the "cobranded" services, but if you want to, Sun will make it really, really easy for you to do so, and in return they get a cut of whatever you spend in the services.
Sun doesn't understand marketing. (Score:2)
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Is that the Google Search Bar which installed by default when I installed a minor update to the JRE? Cocksuckers didn't even ask me, if I used the "Recommended Settings" - it just suddenly appeared.
Fucking terrible behaviour.
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I totally agree.
Koffice wont have that advertisement noise.
Overreact much? (Score:2)
Advertisements. On your documents. Your important documents..
Do you think *anyone* would be open to this? Sun's board above all?
"Let's really screw ourselves and any chance we have to have OOo float.. How about selling ad space on people's documents! It works like the specialized coupon printers at the Grocers'!"
"If Writer detects a keyword, 'overdue', for example, it sticks an ad for Accenture in the footer!"
"Genius!"
"Brilliant!"
"Capital Idea!"
Take a breath.. Imagine a branded OpenOffice, as in the c
daft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think they see it as much as giving stuff away as potentially getting developers for free.
They need further development, they can't afford it right now, open source code offers a solution.
They earn their money on supported versions, hardware and also support of running the systems I assume.
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No one said it has to be $free$.
Open Source != Free (Score:3, Insightful)
Giving stuff away happens when things are "Free" as in beer.
Making things available happens when things are "Free" as in Freedom.
Java has been free like beer for ages. Coincidentally, SUNW/JAVA stock values were higher than they are today.
Free stuff attracts people. Microsoft wins developer mindshare with free or ridiculously low-cost software development tools. College students learn what they can afford to learn.
Free stuff up front with paid support to be delivered in the future is the way things seem
Long term prospects are not good for Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun has to find a way to create a sustainable revenue stream, and it doesn't have much to work with.
Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
They're a systems integration company. They don't need to sell "invented here" to be profitable.
Sun will sell you whatever you want. Invented by Sun, or not.
They sell solutions, not widgets.
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Re: integrator as well as builder (Score:2)
Sun mostly sells hardware, and adds anything whatsoever the customer needs to build a solution. This includes software, obviously, but also cisco gear, racks, UPSs and the like.
--dave (biased, you understand) c-b
Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun (Score:5, Informative)
Their FY2008 services revenue was $5.26B, storage revenue was $2.35B, and their computer systems revenue was $6.26B.
While the services revenue is up 3% from FY 2007, storage revenue is only up 1.6%, and computer systems revenue is down about 3%.
Given that 38% of their revenue is derived from services, and that services is their fastest growing growth sector, what makes you believe that services doesn't provide a revenue stream in practice?
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Apples to oranges isn't it. If 38% of your revenue is derived from services, you are most definitely in the service business.
Re:Long term prospects are not good for Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember Sun adverts during the dot-com boom days that mocked IBM for having a huge range of stuff, where as Sun sold only one simple stack of stuff- theirs.
Post dotBOOM (Score:2)
I remember Sun adverts during the dot-com boom days that mocked IBM for having a huge range of stuff, where as Sun sold only one simple stack of stuff- theirs.
That was during the dot-com. After the dotBOOM, the only companies that survived are those who sell solutions.
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But will that be changing any time soon? We can all see financial problems on the horizon for Sun, yet they have the tech, people, products and customers to become much more like IBM.
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Lets hope they don't take good things like open office and java down with them. ( like it sounds they are doing.. )
Advertisements? How stupid can you get.
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The Sparc architecture is not significantly better than x86-64 to justify the additional cost and "non-standard" architecture to buyers,
they pretty much stopped doing sparc stuff years ago. their new gig is the T series (t1000 and t2000 series). these are high-cpu (thread) count chips and when you do the equiv of 'show cpu' (so to speak) you get 32, 64 even 256 lines of output on status per 'cpu' (thread) that you can turn on or off (on a running system) or put into pending-standby. you CANNOT do anythin
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You do know that the T Series, were actuelly X86_64 cpu until Sun bought it, and changed the instruction set to sparc right?
Personally I think that change, was the biggest mistake that sun have done in recent years.
Linux ain't exactly Enterprise Grade. (Score:2)
No matter what you might believe or have read, Linux is not Enterprise quality software.
We are barely there.
Speaking as an Enterprise Linux architect, the tools and stability of Linux distrubutions are not up to snuff. Sun handily beats Linuxes in this area.
ZFS, Jumpstart, FLARs, package management, patching... The list goes on.
Anyone who suggests FUSE as an option needs to get a clue. Selling NAS isn't always an option, or even viable. Kickstart/AutoYaST are OK for what they are, but the systems manage
They dropped $1 billion on MySQL (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a software guy, so maybe I'm missing something. But paying $1 billion for MySQL (less than 1 year ago!) didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Wasn't a lot of the code GPL?
As of yesterday the stock market values the equity at $3 billion. And actually values the company at only $1.6 billion (they have $2.6 billion in cash but also have $1.3 billion in debt).
Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business. Even in 2008, a billion US dollars is still a *lot* of money.
Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL (Score:5, Interesting)
MySQL's business model was to sell commercial licenses to people who were too legal risk adverse to use it without one.
Sun, thankfully, has a completely different business model.
They sell solutions. If they don't have to pay for licenses for MySQL they can offer solutions that include MySQL for cheaper than if they have to. Does that add up to a billion dollars? No idea.
Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL (Score:5, Interesting)
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They also sell "MySQL boxes" - that their engineering group has tuned specifically to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware and give it to the database. Schwartz talks about doubling the performance of MySQL on certain equivalent hardware platforms. Presumably anybody could do that, or they could pay for the MySQL engineering team to do it and get it right. Schwartz is banking on it being more cost effective for customers to rely on the MySQL engineering team to do the optimizations than
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whether or not MySQL is more or less secure than Postgres is another matter altogether
Now that statement puzzles me.
If your systems are designed for maximum security, the database is on a separate server to the application, both servers are firewalled to only allow known-good connections through, the connection between application and database may if necessary be encrypted, the user the application connects to the database as will only have the permissions it needs (and indeed won't even be able to establis
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You could have tripwire verify state on both systems and watch if there are any intrusions.
If there is, you sever the link between app and db. That's why I like using a brouter. Hackers see no firewall nor can they access it.
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Wouldn't that be a breach of the GPL? If they are distributing a product based on GPL code but not distributing the source with it...
As far as I remember, the GPL can't be "time shifted" like that.
Well, I guess like everything else in business, things are interpreted in units of "time-to-sue".
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They own all the copyright to the MySql code and as such they can do what they like with it.
The fact that they distribute some of their code under the GPL puts conditions on what *you* can do with it. But they aren't bound by those conditions.
Re:They dropped $1 billion on MySQL (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the point was that Sun could easily sell solutions with MySQL without buying the company. So in essence they spent $1 billion on the name.
I believe that part of the purpose of a buyout such as that is to also get hold of the developers.
I am not saying that the whole deal was worth 1 billion, but you have to take the "getting the core developers to be on our boat" into account as well.
Well, they didn't go to the government ... (Score:2)
... like everyone seems to be doing these days.
Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business.
No, they need help from the government, so they can throw YOUR money away! (Sorry, I tend to get cranky after reading "The Economist" these days.)
Maybe this Open Source Strategy will work for Detroit:
"(ring) Hello, President Obama here. Oh, Hi GM. What? You want how many BILLIONS? Get yourself Open Source! Good-Bye! (slam)"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thx for the comments on MySQL as part of Sun. The MySQL business is growing faster now than before (measured in revenues) and we are the fastest growing major DBMS business in the world. So, although someone could claim I am biased, I think it is fair to say that the acquisition made sense from a pure revenue growth perspective.
Additionally, Sun is selling hardware to MySQL users and customers - servers that provide a performance boost over what people use today.
Thirdly there are synergies between MySQL and
branding? (Score:3, Interesting)
Message to Jonathan Schwartz (Score:5, Interesting)
From my perspective (I've used and bought Suns for decades), Sun is heading full tilt down a path towards the cliff edge. What they're doing is 100% wrong.
Their interest in open source is fine, but it's not a good strategy for business profits unless they want to become another RedHat providing Linux services and support --- a role in which they would be coming up from behind very slowly. It's a role for which they're not cut out, because their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.
Sun needs to stop thinking of open source as a business strategy, because for them it's merely what's referred to as a hygiene factor in social sciences --- it's not a benefit when it's exercised, but it's a severe demerit when it's not exercised. In other words, yes, be fully open with software, but not because it's a source of profits, but because you'll be shunned without it.
For profits, capitalize on what you have: awesome hardware and competent Professional Services. Invest more in your CPU division with its great Niagara processors, so that when Intel is offering 16-core CPUs and talking about 64, you can be offering 256-core and talking about 4096. Take on nVidia and AMD on the SIMD front, so that while they're toying with noddy graphics cards for GPGPU, you can offer 64k SIMD stream processors far more tightly coupled to your host cores.
We've recently entered the Age of Multicore, and you (Sun) have a good reputation in that area, and you know how to build good hardware (nobody has ever marked you down for that). Why not capitalize on your existing skills, resources and reputation in this area, instead of chasing rainbows?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You've never used a Sunfire x4100 x86_64 server (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it that stupid people always put the blame on the vendor. There must be a pattern in there...
We have over 50 xfires (4100s, 4200s, 4600s) in production, so I feel an obligation to comment on this drivel.
Sorry, either you're just making up shit here or you're the wrong guy for the job.
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Why would you even need a raid controller? ZFS takes care of that for you.
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The problem with Sun is that they're WAY behind the curve compared to even IBM in supporting Open Source (remember, IBM spent a huge amount of money porting Linux to run on their "big iron" platforms back in better economic times).
Because IBM has a great reputation as a computer services company nowadays, they can easily offer powerful enterprise-wide computing platforms at reasonable prices--and IBM has much more name recognition than Sun.
My one thought about IBM & Linux (Score:2)
It's absolutely clear IBM is contributing tons to Open Source. It's easy to note 'ibm.com' addresses in changelogs for tons of projects.
Generic Linux contributions and the success of Linux is key to them. You sell Linux to x86 users, you suddenly have a nice bridge to Linux on POWER. That seems to have been a pillar of their strategy.
While this is a good thought, and they also derive some recognition as general Linux experts, I'm suprised they haven't more directly capitalized on their investment. I wou
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There's one little problem with your suggestion, Morgaine: A huge cashflow and credit crunch is in progress, and companies are NOT choosing to buy big, expensive new servers right now. According to the AP [tinyurl.com],
...[S]ales of its high-end servers... fell 27 percent in the latest quarter to $576 million. That's a staggering shortfall for a division that contributes a quarter of Sun's overall revenue.
"Build it and they will come" is not going to work in the current economic climate.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
their reputation in the open source world is marginal at best because they've always been half-hearted about it.
I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with that but just to provide an alternative opinion
"I think Sun has, well, with this contribution, have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership. It's an example that I hope others will follow." - Richard Stallman
http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/sun_s_choice_of_the_gpl_and_rms_in_the_webcast [fsfe.org]
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Re:Message to Jonathan Schwartz (Score:4, Interesting)
I quite disagree: open source needs something to run on, and the price-performance of the Niagara is impressive. In the machine room, I'd rather have Sun, IBM or H-P gear than anything built on mas-market PC parts: I hate fixing critical components (;-))
Open source software, on the other hand, is improved by being in a mass market: the price is already as low as you can get, so the effort goes into improving the quality. It's very welcome in my machine room.
--dave
"Branding space?" Really? (Score:2)
Newsflash (Score:2, Insightful)
Sun's approval rating drops by 15% - 18% today.
"but CEO Jonathan Schwartz contends users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, OpenSolaris and Sun's GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress."
So, during a time of economic stress people will just be crawling over themselves to pay for MySQL, OpenSolaris, and GlassFish when the reason they would use those during such a time would be that they are free?
What is the point exactly? (Score:2)
What does it mean for a company to "survive" if it lays off most of its employees? I don't see what the point is.
I've often thought about this notion of a company's lifespan. Where is it written that companies should live forever? They are made up of people with finite lifespans. Companies clearly go through similar "life" phases: enthusiasm of youth, conservatism of middle age, fatigue of
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Just to bring you back on topic, we're not talking about Microsoft here.
No branding (Score:2)
Since OO is FOSS, someone will simply fork the code with all that crap commented out.
A new Fork of OO (Score:2)
Sounds like a new fork of OO is needed, one that is 'ad-free'.
Sun is done. (Score:2)
Why windows? (Score:2)
I can buy that growth of non-x86 markets are relatively stagnant, but it seems to me that Linux is still quite healthy.
stock price (Score:2)
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With the stock market crash there are a LOT of companies like this. The problem is that they are burning through their cash so buying them does no good.
Ads will devalue their asset. None for me!!! (Score:2)
I have contributed to OpenOffice.org (testing) since earlier days. I had to switch away from it in January because trying to pass a contract back and forth with someone who uses MS Office resulted in a corrupted layout. (lots of other problems like that in the past, now I don't know).
Let me just say that as much as I have wished well for OpenOffice and Sun, there is no way at all I would use OpenOffice if it had ads in it. Sure they can make money but just don't put advertising in it. I wouldn't use it for
Scratching my head (Score:4, Interesting)
1. My kids go to school in the Bay Area. Both have an impressive wardrobe of Sun-logo'd t-shirts (the designs are much better that your average "slap-a-logo-on-a-white-T"). While I'm not complaining, why is Sun clothing my children while laying off 5,000 staff?
2. I've been in the computer business for ~25 years. I've done work with Sun in the past (~15 years ago). I can tell you what business Microsoft is in. I can tell you what business HP is in. Ditto Oracle. Heck I even think I could tell you what business IBM is in these days. I have *no* idea what business Sun is in. Oh I know they own some Open Source apps and once upon a time they made computers around the SPARC processor - but what do they do now? How do they intend to make money and return a profit for their shareholders?
Re:Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
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OpenSolaris Advantages (Score:5, Informative)
OpenSolaris has all the advantages of Solaris 10 and more. So you're looking at things such as ZFS, DTrace, Containers, etc..., that are already in Solaris, as well as entirely new things not yet in Solaris, such as a much improved and more user friendly installation system.
OpenSolaris is basically to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's the cutting edge of Solaris development, with numerous Solaris devs contributing to it; it's an incubation ground. As the features mature and the bugs are ironed out, key features are then moved into Solaris, which is expected to be deployed on servers, mission critical systems, mainframes, and so on. Only recently did Solaris gain the ability to boot off a ZFS root fs for instance, but OpenSolaris has had that capability for quite some time.
If you're interested in Solaris, OpenSolaris is the way to go, as you're less likely to be worried about some minor bugs and more interested in seeing everything it has to offer, including the cutting edge. I'd recommend you review the Solaris and OpenSolaris wikipedia pages for a good overview, which can link to more in-depth information on some of the specific features I mentioned above.
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Actually for some things you want SXCE(Solaris Express), it's closer to Solaris 10 and includes more packages.
I had to install SXCE for AVS (which rocks) and xvm support (Xen) is included as well.
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The post above has already highlighted some advantages, so this is just to point out how easy it is to try out.
Just download the OpenSolaris ISO (the last one was 2008.05, with 2008.11 imminent): OpenSolaris [opensolaris.org]
If you're a little masochistic, try running it as a live CD.
A better way is to download VirtualBox (another Sun open-source product, although there is a more-complete non-open-source version that is also free (of charge)): VirtualBox [virtualbox.org]
Just install OpenSolaris as a guest OS and try it - no need to re-partit
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complete with backwards compatibility going back over ten years even in the drivers (compare with linux where I struggle to compile modules from six months ago against new releases)
Reminds me when an upgrade to ArchLinux just removed whatever USB-device handling stuff there was earlier and replaced it with something else which made it so no USB-devices worked. Awesome stuff! I will never try ArchLinux again. Or Yoper, or plenty of shitty Linux dists.
At least with things like Debian and the BSDs things keep on working, I have no interest in spending my time with a by the distribution developers voluntarily messed up machine. And I do assume that there would be much less mess in Solaris
Opensolaris is substantially more stable (Score:2)
And FreeBSD is more stable ( and arguably mature ) then OpenSolaris. If SUN becomes pain in the butt, then people will move away from them. As long as there is still competition, you cant just sit on your laurels.
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Opensolaris is substantially more stable than Linux
Bullshit. The last two times I tried opensolaris, the installation was catastrophically destroyed the first time that I upgraded it. System wouldn't even fucking boot.
It might be stable if you never touch it, but so is linux, so the difference can't be that great. Besides, an admin is expected to, at the very least, perform security upgrades on a regular basis. Their packaging system is *beyond* broken and smf is a horrible piece of trash that makes you long for the simplicity of rc.d scripts.
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CDDL over GPL is one advantage, to some. Another is binary drivers.
Lets face it, neither is ever going to be in Linux.
Re:Strategy (Score:4, Informative)
Solaris on SPARC hardware is the gold standard of reliability and quality. So if need the best reliability and you've got money to burn (i.e. banks), that's what Sun should be able to persuade you to buy. If you own the best OS in the world, and you can't make money, you've got big problems.
Re:Strategy (Score:4, Informative)
But they do make money from Java. In FY2008, Sun made $220M from Java, $208M from MySQL, and $216M from Solaris and Virtualization.
In addition to that, they made a little over $4B from hardware and software support.
There software business is up 27% from FY2008 Q1 to FY2009 Q1. Compare that to their systems business that is down 17% over the same time frame.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe Solaris on SPARC isn't as fantastic as you think. Back in the day when SPARC hardware actually mattered, the Linux SPARC port was rather successful. People actually chose to run Linux even though Solaris came free with the hardware and had perfect driver compatibility.
I don't see a future for Sun, no matter which part of their business they focus on, except possibly MySQL. Sun can't live off of MySQL unless they turn themselves into MySQL AB, and then what was the point?
Back in the day.. (Score:2)
Solaris was relatively stagnant feature-wise. This is not a bad thing for Unix, but the company focus of the late 90s included a lot of people who appreciated the moves that Linux was making. Sure, application compatibility across versions was non-trivial, and behaviors got tweaked constantly, but at a given moment by and large they had interesting ideas relative to Sun. So Sun hardware tended to get Linux thrown on it in some circumstances (the Sun hardware was leaps and bounds better than x86 based har
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I attribute that to bias, laziness, and fear of the unknown. Was the system still under support when they did that? People who do that are less familiar with Solaris since they couldn't run it at home for free. They've been running Linux so long that they can't seem to bother to learn a new OS, or the idiosyncracies of a slighty different OS. They'd rather install something familiar.
Re: (Score:2)
Sun can't live off of MySQL unless they turn themselves into MySQL AB, and then what was the point?
Quite. And before they bought MySQL (the VHS of databases) they were already shipping the superior PostgreSQL with Solaris 10.
They obviously bought MySQL as a kind of marketing stunt. It hasn't really paid off.
Every year, Sun buys a big company, and a few months later lays off thousands of staff. Remember Cobalt? StorageTek? Now MySQL. They get a big tax discount for redundancies.
There are some brilliant
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.
History is littered with the corpses of companies that had great products but were lousy at selling them.
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly what I'm saying! If you've got the best platform, and no one wants to buy it, you suck at selling stuff.
Sometimes the best just costs too much. If the extra expense doesn't produce any extra return then no matter how hard you tout it, provided your customers have the sense, you won't sell it.
I love sirloin steak, but beef mince fills me up too.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you overestimate how much the platform matters. In the server market, virtually everything runs on virtually everything. (With exceptions for legacy OSes like OS/400). What does it matter if I have the "best" hardware platform when I can run the exact same software on "not-as-good" platforms, and buy twice as many boxes?
Re: (Score:2)
All of these things have advantages over other things.
Your mistake is in thinking that Sun won't sell you a solution that isn't based on their technology. They will. They'll sell you whatever will do the job and they can get a decent price on the license so they can make some profit.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
lol, yeah, leenucks is so much like the better one! Everything must be leenucks! Linus = god, Sun = shit. Why would one want to have a choice when it comes to OSes!?! Linux is like so much the best in everything!! We don't need no other OS or development.
Have you used OpenSolaris? Have you had issues with hardware support yourself? Have you used the BSDs or Linux 10 years ago?
Why burn cash and developers time on Gnome!?! Why on Firefox? Anything except Amarok? Another terminal than aterm!?!
We need plenty mo
Re:Jonothan Schwartz is safe, at least! (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for Sun, and I suspect that you do, too. I'm an "individual contributor" and I have nothing to do with management. Nor do I own any Sun stock.
Since I can't give you the Flamebait mod you deserve - since you should and do know better - I'll point out a couple of things for the benefit of those playing along at home.
The cuts are not likely to come from "vital groups that provide support and engineering for major customer contracts". That would be suicidal; Schwartz, Green, and others at the upper levels have said as much. They are more likely to come from areas that are consistently failing to meet targets or provide cashflow. Software, support, and allied services currently stand the best chance of generating near-term revenue.
And I'm sorry you're so upset that you won't be getting a pay rise this year. Guess what? I won't, either! But you don't see me bitching about it. WTF do you expect? "We're having a major downturn, here's your hefty salary increase"?
If you want to keep your job, you'd better quit whingeing about how you're not getting rich as quickly as you might like and that you're not going to be able to expense quite so many lattÃs as you've been, quit worrying about what Jonathan Schwartz' ponytail is having for breakfast, and start doing something to generate value for the company and customers, because if you can't show that you are, you're going to walk.
Here's a tip: If you're not doing something relating to software or support, get your arse over there and start doing something with a demonstrable benefit to the firm's bottom line ASAP.
Way to miss OP's point. (Score:2, Informative)
Way to miss the parent's point. He wasn't complaining that there are no raises this year. His complaint was that a guy whose only contribution was to do a reverse stock split cosmetic alteration that resulted in more layoffs and massive reduction in value of the stock to pre-split prices did NOT get a raise freeze.
I used to work at Sun too and it was typical that someone would be laid off and hired back. If you're not going to maintain staff cuts then all you're doing is making press today and eating layoff
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF do you expect? "We're having a major downturn, here's your hefty salary increase"?
$11 million sounds like quite a large bonus - that's gotta be a smack in the face for all Sun employees if the company is saying they can't afford to give them an inflationary pay increase. I bet there are people working harder at Sun than the CEO, the myth that managers work harder/deserve more money than others needs to die. You can't blame an employee for being angry at that.
Incidentally share holders couldn't care less (on the whole) about "value". They care about short-term monetary profit, nothing els
Some key points you forgot to mention (Score:2)
Thank goodness you're not a moderator. The OPs points about Schwartz are spot on.
You also conveniently left out a couple key points about Sun. First, they consistently pay lower salaries than others. Oh yes, I know that they trot out the usual Marketing BS about the Salary Surveys that they buy. But compare that to real job offers from other places in the Valley, and Sun is always a low-baller.
Sun also has a long track record of offing employees for H1-Bs; a record which is so bad that it's documented exter
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't always work on IE either, so quityerbitchin (or atleast direct it to where it should be directed, which is not at IE but rather at the lame developers who hacked this POS).
Mixed bag.. (Score:2)
To me, Sun has never recovered from being dragged down by their success with the '.com' bubble.
They floundered around, not making clear whether they thought their SPARC architecture or x86 was their focus, whether Solaris or Linux was their focus. It basically kept shifting.
I will say I think they currently have an idea of the market they should pursue. They aren't chasing the AIX customer set. Sun definitely lost some Solaris business to AIX as they floundered around, yet they aren't fooling themselves