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Sun Microsystems Linux Business

Sun Drops Linux Distro 281

Posted by michael from the hot-potato dept.
The Wireless Guy writes "eWeek is reporting that Sun has decided to stop offering a Linux distribution. From the story: "Yes, this is a change in strategy. Our Sun Linux distribution is essentially Red Hat Linux with a few minor tweaks," John Loiacono, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group"... so, is this good news for Red Hat?" They were rethinking it, and I guess they've had a good long thunk.
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Sun Drops Linux Distro More

Sun Drops Linux Distro

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  • Further proof (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:21PM (#5619209)
    This is only further proof that Sun plans on dropping out of the entry level server market and sticking with their old method of selling enterprise level systems with a more robust and proven operating system, Solaris. Too much competition exists on the Linux side of things to make enough money, with Dell, IBM, HP, and others fighting it out.

    Watch for Sun phasing out the blade-style systems next.

    • Re:Further proof (Score:5, Informative)

      by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:41PM (#5619369) Homepage Journal
      Your post is only further proof that you don't know jack about Sun. If we were doing well sticking to the old method, we never would have travelled down this road in the first place.

      It is my impression, though I am not speaking as a Sun PR/Marketing person or in any other official capacity, that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux, and so we have changed our direction only slightly, from "modified RedHat" to whatever distro or distros we end up pulling off the shelf without making modifications.

      • Re:Further proof (Score:3, Insightful)

        by spinlocked ( 462072 )
        ...that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux...

        When I was at Sun, this is exactly what I tried to feed back. Who in their right mind would want a non-standard/niche flavour of linux when they can get the real thing from RedHat. Aside from support what value would Sun be offering? The last thing Sun needs is to become another ICL.

        This reminds me of Sun386. Remember that? Reactionary thinking by elements of management who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.

        I like linux, but
        • When I was at Sun, this is exactly what I tried to feed back. Who in their right mind would want a non-standard/niche flavour of linux when they can get the real thing from RedHat. Aside from support what value would Sun be offering? The last thing Sun needs is to become another ICL.

          Exactly! I found this comment to be insightful:

          "Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux," Schwartz said.

    • Not really...quite the opposite (Score:4, Interesting)

      by siskbc ( 598067 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:42PM (#5619373) Homepage
      Too much competition exists on the Linux side of things to make enough money, with Dell, IBM, HP, and others fighting it out.

      See, that's the thing though, they're not,as it states in the beginning of the article...

      "our customers told us they didn't want a standard distribution that had some tweaks, so I decided to fix the problem by simply supporting between two and four standard Linux distributions, though I have not as yet decided which these will be."

      So basically, they're going to stop doing the only thing that IBM wasn't doing: namely, releasing their own distro...such as it was anyway. If anything, this brings them more into competition with IBM. That should be fun for them.

    • Re:Further proof (Score:3, Informative)

      by guacamole ( 24270 )
      I don't understand why this has been modded up.

      No, this is not a further proof. Read the article. Sun is not saying that they're dropping their Linux products or low-end Solaris/SPARC servers. What they're saying is that they're dropping "Sun Linux" in favor of more standard Linux distributions.

    • Re:Further proof (Score:5, Funny)

      by joe_bruin ( 266648 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:08PM (#5619929) Homepage Journal
      see, what you fail to understand here is that sun is not really a "company" in the traditional sense of the word. sun is much more like a bunch of warring enclaves. the interesting thing is that they have no real concept of the real world outside of them, and certainly no central management.

      the sparc division has reached their goal in life, 64 bits. 64bits means "the best chip ever", and they can now retire because the competition will never be able to improve on their miracle cpu. it was true 8 years ago (actually, it wasn't), why shouldn't it be true today? sure, they may like to tinker around with their chips, mostly as a hobby, but it's not like anyone is going to give them the budget to do anything with them anyway.

      the solaris division made a kickass os. performance rocks, stability rocks, security... well, two out of three ain't bad. sure, it ain't pretty or useable, but remember, sun delivered us from the mainframe os's, which were at least twice as ugly. their only problem is that people keep bugging them about making an x86 version. why, for god's sake, would anyone want to run solaris on x86? i mean, seriously. they're not happy about it and trying to get the project canned, so they can get back to tuning performance.

      the java group are the young guys in sun. this once-beloved buzzword generating group has proved to be quite a money pit for sun. now that even marketing doesn't love them, they've fallen into a routine. every tuesday, they run their auto-deprecating program, that goes through the api renaming functions and changing parameters. then they bump up the version number and release an entirely new version of the "write once, run anywhere (slowly)" environment that breaks every application out there. the people that are responsible for keeping the enterprise servers running right are not amused by this. of course, the best version of the java environment is the win32 version (does anyone know why? it's not like java is useful for desktop applications), with the solaris version running second (including a painful install and configuration procedure). solaris does not ship with java, since it is unreliable.

      the hardware group used to make the coolest purple boxes ever. now they make pizza box (no, smaller, blade) commodity servers at overpriced rates. don't get me wrong, the e10000's are still awesome, but the only work to be done there is for someone to dustoff the inventory before a customer comes in. the customers who got stuck buying blades due to the fact that their organization has some agreement with a sun reseller sure as hell don't want their webservers running solaris. they're bugging sun to run linux on there. of course, os's are not the hardware group's thing, so they have to prod the solaris people to try their hand at linux (a competitor to solaris). the solaris people are not ecstatic about this.

      sun linux gets cancelled today, new java tomorrow, new x86 based blades the next (getting ultrasparc3 docs to the openbsd group? never gonna happen), it's all par for the course at sun.
    • Is Twirlip of the Mists Ron Rivest?

      No, but thanks for asking. ;-)

      The name "Twirlip of the Mists" comes from a book. I guess I'm not the only one who thought of using it as a pseudonym.

      You may now begin the mod-bombing.

  • Red Hat a bigger player than Sun? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tindur ( 658483 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:22PM (#5619212)
    Is Red Hat now considered a bigger player than Sun?

  • Those Sun guys. (Score:5, Funny)

    by termos ( 634980 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:22PM (#5619218) Homepage
    First this [slashdot.org] and now this! When will they ever stop?

  • good. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hatrisc ( 555862 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:23PM (#5619225) Homepage
    i'm glad. i don't like rpm based distributions. i've had so many headaches due to rpm.... grrr.... what we need is more source based distros like gentoo. then we'll be talking.

    • Re:good. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zugot ( 17501 )
      I am a faithful gentoo user, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. I can think of a couple times recently when a "emerge sync && emerge -u world" screwed up my box.

      I am not trying to turn this into a "which distro format is the best" discussion. Gentoo does have it's problems.
      • Sounds like you should have done "emerge sync && emerge -up world" instead. That little -p flag is great for keeping you out of sticky situations. ;) :)
    • However, since most of the "industry standard" distributions are based on rpm, Sun will likely continue supporting rpm based distributions only.

  • I predicted this (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fudgefactor7 ( 581449 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:24PM (#5619234)
    It didn't make any sense to produce a product (for free) that would directly compete (in some circumstances) with a product that they produce for sale (Solaris/SunOS).

  • Reasonable? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by YellowElectricRat ( 637662 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:25PM (#5619240) Journal

    It would be nice if Sun (and IBM et al) started contributing to an OS with real promise, like one of the BSDs. Not that Linux isn't promising, I just think that BSD's long-term future is brighter...

    Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems - if they could manage the influx of interest, I think we would end up with a much nicer product.

    • Re:Reasonable? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by haggar ( 72771 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:41PM (#5620104) Homepage Journal
      Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems

      And the BSD documentation! Anyone who used FreeBSD can vouch for the incredible job these guys did in documenting everything clearly and with examples! Sorry but Linux is so much behind in this respect (you wouldn't know it if all you ever used is in fact Linux).

      • Re:Reasonable? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by walt-sjc ( 145127 )
        Yeah, even though the installation process sucks shit, it is documented. Once you get the thing installed, it works pretty well.

        • Let me put it this way: I always managed to install and configure FreeBSD, each single time I did it. I was also rather succesful with Slackware. On the other hand, I am having some realy stupid problems with RedHat Advanced Server installation and configuration, and what's worse, their support (standard license) isn't very helpful. [grudging rant]You'd think that for US$1000+ they would band over backwards to fix this issue.[/grudging rant]
    • I thought I was the only person to think that way.

      Honestly, *BSD is the reason TCP/IP works. They have a fast micro kernel (which a lot of Linux people say isn't possible). It's secure and free despite relatively low numbers of users and coders. BSD feels a hell of a lot snappier than Linux because it is a micro kernel (truely preemptable I suppose is the reason for this).

      If BSDs had as much resources backing it as Linux, BSDs would be the defacto standard server. It would be wonderful if all the driv
      • erm... I advise you to go and look at *BSD
        again. The only big one which uses a microkernel is Darwin / OS X and that is certainly slower than its competitors. It also doesn't really make that much use of the microkernel; its just that way because some NeXT guys thought it was cool in the 80s and Steve Jobs agreed.

    • Re:Reasonable? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Stephen VanDahm ( 88206 )
      I run FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux, and aside from the fact that FreeBSD is better documented, I haven't noticed that one is really any better than the other. But then again, I don't put much strain on my machines. Why do people think that BSD is technically superior to Linux? I'm not trolling or arguing -- I really want to know what people think....

      Steve

  • If they're leaving the Linux market (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:25PM (#5619241) Journal
    Why do they want to get their own font handler in xfree86? They have their own commercial implementation for solaris right? They want linux/bsd users to wait for their favorite toolkits to bundle in support of this new standard? I know Sun has interest in GNOME, but still GNOME is based on gtk which is based on pango, and pango+xft+fontconfig does the same thing as their own (not-yet working) design (can't remember the name).

    • Re:If they're leaving the Linux market (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:34PM (#5619313)
      Well, Sun does have its own X server but it's increasingly phasing these things out in favour of open products like XFree86. Sun's eventual goal is to take the Gentoo model: applications downloaded as source code, and then compiled locally, automatically. Indeed, their dropping of RedHat is largely because what they intend to do is make Solaris 10 essentially Gentoo Linux with the SunOS kernel and Sun user space.

      This is why people need to switch over to Gentoo Linux, it's so much easier than RedHat, Debian, and OpenDarwin. By always compiling locally, the apps on your machine are optimized the platform they run on, rather than the lowest common denominator. This helps Sun as very few apps are compiled for Sparc architectures when distributed, so leveraging Gentoo this way will really help them.

      Gentoo is awesome. I recommend you check them out.

      • Re:If they're leaving the Linux market (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jahf ( 21968 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @08:05PM (#5619917) Journal
        Sun's not dropping Red Hat. We're dropping the modification and rebranding of Red Hat. The article, if you read it, states that the hope is to ship -actual- Red Hat (and other distros) products on Sun x86 hardware (rather than rebranding it Sun Linux and dealing with all the hassles that takes).

        And, being a Gentoo user myself as well as a Sun employee, I can say I've heard almost nothing about Gentoo internally with regards to Solaris -or- Linux. Not to say there might not be a group I don't work with that has learned to love the Gentoo like I do, but in every case that I've talked to someone about it, I had to explain what it was.

        Sun -is- focusing on LSB compliance, both for Linux (which can be accomplished by using LSB compliant distributions) and for future parts of Solaris.

        But as far as the idea of compiling packages from source like with Gentoo, when it comes to Solaris on SPARC, there is almost no reason to do this. One of the beauties of the SPARC platform is the backwards compatibility. If you have that compatibility, and you have known quantities for system configuration, you don't need to compile from source, it just steals cycles from your customers.

      • This is why people need to switch over to Gentoo Linux, it's so much easier than RedHat, Debian, and OpenDarwin.

        You're right, it is so much easier to go through the process of [gentoo.org]
        configuring and compiling the entire system from the command-line than it is to point and click through an installer that auto-detects everything and gives you a desktop right out of the box. [redhat.com] Tell me with a straight face that you would recommend Gentoo to a novice friend before RedHat.

        By always compiling locally, the apps on you
      • Good arguments for going with the original system Gentoo copied: FreeBSD. Not only do you get all the benefits of Gentoo, you get a pedigree closer to UNIX than even Solaris. Plus top notch documentation and legendary stability.
    • If they're leaving the Linux market

      READ THE ARTICLE. Sun is NOT leaving the Linux market. They are simply dropping Sun-branded Linux in favor of sticking to a handful of existing distributions, such as Red Hat Advanced Server. Sun is doing this because their customers want it this way.
    • They're not leaving the Linux market. Please take an introductory course in "Reading Comprehension" and then read then article again.

  • Why did they bother (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tsugumi ( 553059 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:26PM (#5619250)
    I just don't know why Sun had a Linux distro in he first place. What value did they think they were adding? How could it contribute to their server sales? From the beginning, this stunk of some suit saying "we're getting creamed by Linux on commodity hardware - we should be doing Linux!"

    I know for a fact that businesses told Sun they could not envisage using their offerings - it just didn't get you anything you couldn't get elsewhere better and cheaper...

    • It made sense for them, I mean it could have panned out..

      Free Developers from around the world to pick up the slack their developers couldn't (or vice versa)

      Free QA from around the world.

      Free beer?

      Forget I just said that.
    • Sun sells x86 blade servers. [sun.com]

      They need an os for it and solarisx86 blows on that platform not to mention they canceled it due to lack of demand originally.

      Sun is getting eatin up by Linux. Part of the problem is the delay of the sparcIV, V, and III processors. For $/per mip intel servers rule and are eating up Sun's core market.

      Sun has 2 options.
      1.) wait for the IV, and V sparc processors which will bring sun competitive again and hope intel/AMD slow down
      2.) Come out with their own entry level intel serv
      • Actually Sun thought about cancelling its x86 version and the *users* demanded it back, and Sun has released 9 for intel not that long ago. DVD and downloadable versions.

        Solaris x86 is very much alive and kicking and some shops use it to develop on then port it to the sun boxes later. The price is right.

        Even sell a server with it on it. A rackmount no less.

        http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/index.htm l

        Check this link out. Cancelled?

        http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/x86/index.h tm l

        I have it o

  • Sun will die... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:26PM (#5619251)
    and if they won't die they will announce to fire half of their employees within a year. they just don't get it. the ceo keeps complaining about microsoft, yet sun's is in a completely different ball park. their ultimate enemy is linux and their own processor architecture. they need to make a transition towards a service oriented company - with less dependency on their own technology. like hp does. like ibm does. they don't care what they sell, but they do. goodby sun ! (i liked them A LOT back then when they did workstations).

    • Agreed. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by leerpm ( 570963 )
      The only great value they provide to the market now is big Unix boxen for running large databases. Sun servers are non existant in the low-end, and Linux and Windows will continue to eat up the mid-range server markets for years to come. The high-end backend database servers for running big databases where you need 64 bit computing are the only areas where Linux and Windows have still to hit. Eventually however Intel 64 bit computing will catch up. Then the only thing left will be the super high-end, where

  • Yeah... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eudial ( 590661 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:27PM (#5619261)
    With a growth-rate like this there'll be four distros per human being in 25 years. (roughly 24'000'000'000)

  • Good for everyone. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 0x7F ( 158643 ) <.gro.epopt. .ta. .todhsals.> on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:28PM (#5619267) Homepage
    "[O]ur customers told us they didn't want a standard distribution that had some tweaks, so I decided to fix the problem by simply supporting between two and four standard Linux distributions."

    This can only be good news. Instead of supporting one branded distribution, they'll be supporting multiple existing ones.

  • Translation: (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajuda ( 124386 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:29PM (#5619270)
    A company decided to stop offering for free software that competes with one of its most expensive products. Nothing to see here. Move along.
    • In the absence of reasonable x86 based system boards, no version of Linux competes with their "less expensive" products, nevermind their really expensive products.

    • Re:Translation: (Score:3, Funny)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )
      Whew! For a minute there, I thought I'd see a Slashdot post where some chucklehead didn't use the condescending, tired old "nothing to see here, move along" line.

  • Well yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob Abooey ( 224634 ) <bababooey@techie.com> on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:29PM (#5619272) Homepage Journal
    This makes perfect sense for them. They're still going to support "between two and four standard Linux distributions", they just don't have to spend the money to maintain their own version.

    They are planning on making money on support so this really doesn't change things much in the big picture.

    • No maintenance (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:40PM (#5619751) Homepage Journal
      Except that they never really had their own distro. Sun Linux was just Red Hat "with a few tweaks". It's the old rebranding game. You buy somebody else's technology and sell it under your own name, on the assumption that your name makes the product more sellable. Small problem: companies like Sun and SGI (which also used to rebrand Red Hat) are known for their hardware, not their software. The brands that have established reputations in the Linux world are the well known distros, not the big iron johnny-come-latelies.

      So people who order Sun (or is it Sun Cobalt?) boxes with Red Hat preinstalled will probably get exactly the same software that the would have had with Sun Linux -- tweaks and all. The only difference will be the brand.

      • It's the exact same reasoning for why IBM does not produce "IBM Linux":

        + Sun bases "Sun(tm) Linux" on RedHat 7.2
        + RedHat cancels support for RedHat 7.2 unexpectedly.
        + Sun customers are now pissed at Sun for selling them a Sun(tm) product that's essentially unsupported.

        By just reselling RedHat (etc) Linux, Sun & IBM can keep it's brandname pure from whatever support hassles are going on in the Linux market.

  • what about madhatter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stonebeat.org ( 562495 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:29PM (#5619274) Homepage
    what about the Sun's Linux Desktop "madhatter". what happened to that?

  • Never made sense to me. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by www!!!1 ( 662326 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:31PM (#5619294)
    They done wrote their own Unix(tm)! I mean that "GUI" thing they have blows goats but Solaris is pretty good. We still have our cvs repository here running on a 150 mhz (or something) sun box.

  • Has anyone ever used it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by incom ( 570967 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:32PM (#5619304)
    Has anyone ever used Sun's distro? What 'was' it like?
    • It was very much like RedHat :-)
    • It seemed a bit more consistent than the RedHat of the same version. They had a table showing the differences between RedHat x.x (sorry, I forgot what version was) and Sun Linux 1.0. (again, I am not 100% sure it was 1.0). What I mean is that all the libraries, the compiler and the apps seemed to work together OK. This was no doubt due to having had the time and go through the problems the RH version had. Basically, they added a round of bugfixing, but that's about it.
      There were a few system-level apps avai
  • I'm waiting for sun to drop solaris. That would be news.

  • Thunking (Score:2, Funny)

    by Prong ( 190135 )
    No, no! Thunking is something Micro$oft does to break DOS apps under win32!

  • Anyone scared? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by spells ( 203251 )
    Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux
    Is this really happening that much in enterprises? Or is this SUN's positioning to convince everyone to write code in java. Of course, instead of saying Java is cross-platform, I guess they will be advertising that it's cross-distro :)

  • IBM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cuchullain ( 25146 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:36PM (#5619328) Homepage
    If IBM doesn't support their own version of linux, but lets others do part of the heavy lifting, why would anyone expect Sun to?

    Frankly IBM has the right idea, throw lots of money behind developing components and increased features, then let someone else integrate them. They advance the stuff they want, and don't have to deal with the bits that they find unimportant.

    Just my 2 cents.

    Cuchullain

    • Re:IBM (Score:4, Insightful)

      by utahjazz ( 177190 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:57PM (#5619874)
      20 years ago IBM thought "There's no money in software". A few short years later when MS became a zillion dollar company, this statement went down as one of the biggest bloopers ever.

      Now I wonder if it may come true. It is imaginable that in 10-20 years, most software is free, and hardware vendors again rule the earth unopposed.
      • IBM never thought "there is no money in software". They were and are one of the largest software companies in the world (perhaps the largest today).
        • [IBM was] and are one of the largest software companies in the world (perhaps the largest today)

          No. IBM is worth $140 Billion. Microsoft is worth $268 billion. At one point, Bill Gates was personally worth more than IBM.

          If you take into account that only a small part of IBM's revenue is sofware, and nearly all MS's revenue is software, the difference between them as 'software companies' is even larger.

          Here's a handy URL: Software Companies by Market Cap [yahoo.com]. Of course, IBM is not listed because they're n
  • Just look at how they've handled Solaris x86 support...

  • Not News (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by geomon ( 78680 )
    As I pointed out earlier [slashdot.org], Sun has very little commitment to Linux/Open Source.

    The folks at Gnome need to watch their backs. Sun only looks out for itself.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Sun has very little commitment to Linux. It has a fairly substantial commitment to open source [openoffice.org] (not withstanding the stuff they did before the phrase was even coined - NIS, NFS, OpenLook, etc...)

        You've got me on that one. They did buy Star Office and then release most of the code to openoffice.org.

        I'm still deeply suspicious of Sun's motives. They have been trashing personal computing for decades.

    • Re:Not News (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jahf ( 21968 )
      Please see:

      http://www.sunsource.net/ [sunsource.net]

      Before saying how little commitment Sun has to Open Source.

      The fact that they (ok, "we") are going to be offering -multiple- Linux distributions coming soon notwisthstanding, all you have to do is look at how much of Solaris already uses Open Source (like Linux) and watch the coming releases to see how much MORE we support Open Source utilities in Solaris in the future.

      Sun is one of the largest commercial contributors to the Open Source community and is also a stron
  • I have a friend who was taking a Red Hat Certification class this week and he said one of the people in the class was a Sun engineer who was also working to become Red Hat certified.
  • The last Sun LX-50 I saw said it was running "White Rabbit" Linux. So, I guess this means the rabbit died.

  • What are sun's plans ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:49PM (#5619427) Journal
    They seem to have a multipersonality disorder. First they claim solarisx86 is the answer, then they come out with AMD powered blades and claim solarisx86 is dead and cancels it, then they bundle sun linux for their amd blades, then they decide to resurect solarisx86 after all the vendors left and use it in conjection with linux, now they are deciding to cancel linux again?, or maybe do an all linux with redhat.

    Redhat has stated publically they do not like Sun marketing Solarisx86 and they consider it a competitor. My guess is redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels solarisx86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines.

    Why can't sun just keep a direction or any direction for that matter? It makes them look bad not to mention if I was an IT manager I would feel real uncomfortable purchasing a sun solution. How do I know what I pick today will be supported by sun tommorow?

    Since they are outsourcing all their programmers for minimal wage in India, perhaps the marketing and sales team should be outsourced as well. There expensive American counterparts are not real effective.

    • I know someone that speculated the dual personality thing, based on press releases. It was as if one group was promoting Sun hardware (Linux on Sparc!) and one group was promoting Sun software (Solaris on x86!)

      Really, I don't think it is as much of a problem that is on Hewlett Packard's hands, where they have Alpha (Tru64, VMS), Itanium (which will likely have Tru64, VMS and Linux ports supported in-house), PA-RISC/HPUX, some Xscale stuff, some Transmeta stuff and still maintaining several variations of I

  • This isn't that big (Score:5, Funny)

    by LowneWulf ( 210110 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:51PM (#5619438)
    Basically this is the scenario they must have tired of:

    Employee: Yay! We've got our low-end-Sun-box-with-Sun-Linux! Time to put it to use!
    Manager: But all our software was for Red Hat!!! What good is that...
    Employee: *calls Sun* We need Red Hat Linux supported on our box so we can run our software.
    Sun: We only support Sun Linux.
    Employee: But we don't have any good apps for Sun Linux!
    Sun: Well... just run your Red Hat apps on Sun Linux. It'll work.
    Employee: That's can't possibly work! Our software says "Operates with Red Hat Linux" on the box!
    Sun: Trust me, it'll work....
    Employee: You're insane! My MSCE certificate taught me one thing (and only one thing), and that's every minor revision of every OS is inherently incompatible! I'm buying Dell...

    So instead of confusing people needlessly, they just give people Red Hat. People know what Red Hat is. Who the hell ever heard of Sun Linux?

    • Unfortunately, you're right on too many levels. Most 'I.T. professionals' are clueless mindfucks, and the ranks of the inept were swollen in the late-90's binge. It's going to be nice when they leave to get jobs in other fields, instead of arguing when you tell them why something will/won't work.

      They've (Sun) done the right thing.

  • They are, they're not.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <.ten.pbp. .ta. .maps.> on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:56PM (#5619478)
    Geez.. Sun changes its mind more often than my last 3 girlfriends combined. WTF??
  • Ok, along with the first poster, I must agree, SUN HAD A LINUX DISTRO? I thought that they just ripped it to shreds and called it Solaris... (hm.. maybe that was Unix..)

  • last time I heard a good long thunk... (Score:5, Funny)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @06:58PM (#5619499) Homepage
    I left me zipper undone.

  • Sun has no Linux direction (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:03PM (#5619520)

    (Please excuse my AC post.)

    I attended a 2-day NDA meeting with Sun in California some months ago ... several of the "top brass" were there to give us warm fuzzies about Sun's direction. We're a huge Solaris shop, and Sun hosts these meetings with their large clients from time to time. (Scott also shows up at some of them, but not at ours.) I asked about Linux and if they were going to embrace the Linux platform for "edge of network" applications, or for web servers (we have a lot of Linux web servers here.) The next day, they arranged a long meeting with me and their Linux guy.

    The Linux meeting was to tell me about the new Linux offering they were weeks away from announcing. That's the idea they just killed. The idea was that Sun would start out by basing their Linux distro on RedHat, then would immediately fork the distro to create a specific Linux for their "PC blade" hardware platform. Really, they said the goal was to use Linux to push the PC blades. And they thought people would jump on this bandwagon.

    Personally, I thought that a Linux distro that used the Solaris package manager, and had a layout that was close to how Solaris is set up, and was managed the same way you managed a Solaris box, might be a cool thing for shops that ran a lot of Solaris but not a lot of Linux. Your Solaris admins could pick up this new Linux thing in a hurry, since it looked just like their other Solaris boxes. And you could run it very cheaply on the new "blades". But that wasn't where Sun wanted to go, and they said that to me very plainly.

    So what I learned in that long meeting with Sun is that Sun has no plan for Linux. They honestly don't know what to do with it. I'm frankly a little surprised that StarOffice still supports Linux, but I guess since all the SO work is done in Germany by the StarDivision/Sun group, maybe that's why StarOffice still supports Linux.

    On the PC platform, it's amazing that Sun actually recommends WINDOWS rather than a UNIX OS (like Linux.) They've given up on the PC platform - they let Microsoft own the entry-level systems.

    Ah well.

    • Personally, I thought that a Linux distro that used the Solaris package manager, and had a layout that was close to how Solaris is set up, and was managed the same way you managed a Solaris box, might be a cool thing for shops that ran a lot of Solaris but not a lot of Linux. Your Solaris admins could pick up this new Linux thing in a hurry, since it looked just like their other Solaris boxes. And you could run it very cheaply on the new "blades". But that wasn't where Sun wanted to go, and they said that

  • Difficult spot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:07PM (#5619543) Homepage Journal
    Apparently Sun has huge cash reserves but they can't seem to make up their minds on what to do about Open Source grabbing a chunk of their pie. The way I could see it they could:
    1. keep on selling high end Unix for the datacenter and pray Windows Server 2003 doesn't make huge inroads and that Linux doesn't catch up too fast.
    2. sell their own Linux distro for use on low end machines to emphasize that Solaris is the best for huge servers.
    3. (my own suggestion) Either release the source code for Solaris or help the Linux kernel developers out w/ Sun's own coders and focus more on selling Linux and Unix services like IBM.
    Before I get flamed for mentioning Windows Server 2003, remember eBay seems to make Windows 2000 work for them. Prbably no the best ROI however. Anyway, Sun's leadership seems confused right now.
  • They've built Solaris over many years into a stable, high-quality OS. And SCO can never take it away from them, like they might someday be able to take away Linux.

  • Might be a marketing problem (Score:3, Funny)

    by Fubar ( 1615 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:14PM (#5619584)
    Our Sun Linux distribution is essentially Red Hat Linux with a few minor tweaks," John Loiacono, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group.


    Way to promote the value.

  • Time & Money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:21PM (#5619622)
    There are a couple of interesting points raised by this article.

    The first issue is time. It takes time to put out a custom distribution and/or packages. Unless one is adding an appropriate amount of added value, the effort is questionable. A while back, I was on an internal security team for a major corporation. We had a security software product that we had licensed with access to its source code. We did not review this code, but we did compile it ourselves for a couple of platforms and create official corporate packages for internal use. It then became apparent that the default binary packages direct from the vendor were created using the same options. Without regular code review - what justified the additional time and effort? There was no acceptable answer - we began deploying vendor binary packages.

    It makes sense for Sun to drop the customized distribution approach. After all, are they really bringing anything new to the environment that's not already being covered by existing Linux vendors? Working with those vendors to ensure that your product will work with theirs seems to be a much more sensible, and lest time-costly, approach. Especially when vendors like Red Hat are pushing towards Enterprise solutions.

    Which leads in to the next point. From the article:

    There is little doubt that the notion of "Linux and free have gone away. Red Hat's pricing model now makes that clear," [Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software] said.

    Money. The price of Linux is an interesting point. The no-cost aspects of a Linux distribution is nothing to toss aside too lightly. A lack of licensing fees and tracking headaches makes building a development box based on Linux that much easier. Price is very important to small and mid-sized businesses.

    But even though licensing fees have come under increased scrutiny by corporate interests who wish to limit their spending in the current economy, its a relatively minor point. These environments are more than capable of handling licensing fees (although license tracking is still an issue). So in this regard, free in the sense of no-cost has never been an issue.

    It might be worth noting that even with Red Hat's Advanced Server offering is still about service. Most of what makes up this new product is still available for free in source code form. One could compile one's own binaries and build one's own Advanced Server-like environment. Buying a license from Red Hat gets you access to their binaries - it is essentially buying a service. Which is a real time-saver whether you're in charge of a corporate IT infrastructure or need a friendly platform to help sell hardware.
  • This is a devastating blow to the Linux community and marketplace.

    Wait, you said Sun Linux?

    Never heard of it.

    -Peter
  • WTF did Sun ever want to mess with Linux for? Leave it for the slashdot weenies to play with in their bedrooms and concentrate on shifting some more of those F15Ks on platinum service contracts.

    How long is it now since Sun showed they had the first fucking idea which direction they were trying to go in? Every change of direction and half-baked new idea makes them look more and more stupid.

    I dearly hope they get a grip before it's too late.

  • Get a CLUE, Sun! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:24PM (#5619643) Journal
    Guys,

    The only company that does more waffling than you do is IHOP! (Intl House Of Pancakes)

    If it weren't for the cool stuff you've done for the community, (Open Office, anybody?) I'd think you were a bunch of clueless morons.

    Well, I still think you're a bunch of clueless morons that from time to time do something really, really cool.

    Come on, guys! I'm trying to root for you, here!

    -Ben

  • Just to be clear (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jahf ( 21968 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @07:31PM (#5619675) Journal
    I work for one of the groups specifically involved in this ...

    To be clear, since the title of the original article and this /. article are a bit misleading (IMO):

    Sun will:

    * Continue to offer Linux as an offering on x86-based servers. These offerings will come in the form of standard distributions that everyone today knows and loves.

    * Continue to develop x86 Linux hardware offerings. Currently stocked by the LX50 (released last year) and the Cobalt appliances (where I originally came from). Coming up there are a number of things due out by the end of the year. I'm not going to cover them now so that I can keep my job :)

    * Continue to add software value on top of the Linux distribution by making various Sun softwares (like Star Office, Sun ONE, Java, etc) run ever better on the Linux platforms. ...

    The only thing that Sun is not continuing is the customized Sun Linux 5.0 line. Anyone who took a close look at SL5 knows that it is virtually identical to Red Hat Linux 7.2 (in fact, you can even use Red Hat Network or Ximian Red Carpet to update with RH72 patches, though at that point it's not considered SL5 by Sun).

    The only differences from RH72 were a modified installer (and some might say broken, since it had problems with Kickstarting), some custom Sun labelling, and value-added software (like the Sun Streaming server).

    What is being "killed" is the modification of the base distribution ... in other words, the installer whatever distributions Sun chooses to ship will be the same installer that you get when downloading that distro from it's main website, and the graphics you see during install, etc will be the same as well. We are continuing to layer above and beyond that with things like Sun ONE, etc. ...

    In other words, not much has changed except now Sun does not have to go and recertify drivers (that already worked perfectly well) or try to explain why Sun Linux is NOT a proprietary closed Linux (which many people seemed to think even though it was not so). Now we can concentrate on providing software value add above the base distros, which are already maturing quite well on their own. ...

    This doesn't mean Sun has abandoned Linux or Open Source. The worst it means is that when a Sun engineer creates a patch (for example, on the kernel) that it has to be submitted either to the distro parent and/or the maintainer of that software before it will make it into the core of a Sun Linux product offering. That should be considered a good thing by most people in the community, as it further confirms that Sun is contributing and not closing off any open code.

    • ...mostly because I didn't even know there was a "Sun Linux."

      I'd be annoyed if I got such a thing with a Sun x86 system too. I would be left wondering what customization I might lose if I moved to Mandrake or RedHat 8.0 or Gentoo for that matter. It makes much more sense to ship the Sun specific changes as rpm's I can apply on top of whatever my favorite distribution for the job is. I would expect at least some recent version of RedHat and SuSe to be officially supported of course, but if Sun ships RPM's

  • In Other News (Score:4, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Friday March 28, 2003 @09:40PM (#5620396)
    Sun has revealed the latest weapon [theregister.co.uk] in their fight for market share.
  • This quote, straight from the article, seems to scream FUD! to me:

    "Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux," Schwartz said.

    What the hell? I don't we're there yet -- the distributions are NOT that different. Sun is very very divided on Linux, I just hope they get it together soon and figure out how to work with Linux because McNealy at least is right: a vote for Linux is a vote for Unix!

  • Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, was more specific, saying that Sun hoped to be able to run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server binaries as well as those from UnitedLinux on commodity x86 hardware "as best we can."

    Now if my goal is to run RedHat AS binaries on commodity x86 hardware...why do I need Sun? Because I'm so in love with Solaris x86? Hee...

  • It doesn't mention the good legal reasons... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Saturday March 29, 2003 @03:04AM (#5621418)
    It doesn't mention the good legal reasons for a software house to *not* have their own Linux distribution, and use a third party distribution instead: patents, and "SCO vs. IBM".

    If you have a copy of Sun Linux 5, hold onto it.

    For all of the Sun patents embodied in the GPL'ed portions of your copy of their distribution, you effectively have a royalty-free license to use those Sun patents, in perpetuity.

    This is, BTW, the reason there is no "IBM Linux".

    Sun was probably also at least a little afraid of the sabre-rattling of SCO vs. IBM; by discontinuing distribution, they move out of the area of having the SCO monkey on their backs.

    -- Terry

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