Economist article on Sun's Linux Strategy 133
DavidNWelton writes "The Economist has a well-written article about Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and his Linux strategy. It also mentions Microsoft, and the SCO lawsuit."
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Economist article on Sun's Linux Strategy
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Two points.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This was a well-written article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Did I miss something?
Since when did meandering blather, gibberish, and recycled blurbs make for good writing?
The only "news" in the article is the author's fantasy of a hypothetical Sun buy-out by Oracle or Cisco [neither of whom is doing all that great themselves].
wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we need another company doing the same thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Surely Sun can't exactly sell the hardware for any cheaper than it can already be bought for, so what's the advantage of choosing them over a company like Dell?
Unless of course they bring the power of Solaris to x86 and do it nicely? It's just the same thing from someone else.
Re:Do we need another company doing the same thing (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh you now want an operating system to run an application on that foot warmer? Dull will be happy to RESELL a Microsoft or Red Hat Enterprise OS for a few $K. Sun has Solaris x86 with 0 COGS to them.
Linux a Puppy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Atto
....as some geeks would like (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever Sun's fate, Mr Schwartz is probably right that the software industry will not be taken over by free programs, as some geeks would like. The main attraction of open source, as he says, is the fact that it is "great for innovation", not its questionable claim to be free.
Does the author of this article actually understand anything about software or economics? It seems to me that any consumer in the world should want "free programs" as opposed to those you have to pay for. Even if we assumed that all that silly FUD about Linux having a higher TCO than Windows or Solaris, were true; wouldn't consumers still desire that Linux (and the rest of open soruce) progresses to a point of of lower TCO? And shouldn't that be a lot more viable for open source than a software product which locks you into a big company that just wants more of your money, not less? Anyways, open source is winning and will win more because it can innovate faster and for less. It is not just "great for innovation", it costs less, and costs (TCO) keep going down.
Free as in? (Score:3, Insightful)
The main attraction of open source, as he says, is the fact that it is "great for innovation", not its questionable claim to be free."
Anyone else annoyed with the writers confusion on free software/gratis software throughout the article. Well guess it's viewpoint of the Economist. No wonder they interpret free as "free (as in beer)".
Re:MS gives credence to SCO? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, not everyone "knows" that.
Yes, there are plenty of people who will have that reaction.
For many of them, the word "Linux" does not convey something familiar that they can grasp, just a mixture of promises of free software and threatening images of dirty hippies taking over their MIS department.
For some of them, it's not even that. It's something they have read in some magazine or other and is as irrelevant to them as many other "IT-related hypes" they haven't really jumped into: Java, web services, XML, etc.
For a lot of them, Microsoft is an expensive business partners that, in their strange and costly ways, give them the solutions they know and need to keep their business running. They may not like the price, but they don't exactly hate the company or spell it as M$, or even distrust them. For them, Microsoft works.
There are people inside and outside the IT industry that don't read Slashdot, you know?
There are people who don't follow news related to Linux with the zeal of advocacy.
Many of them have the money and the position to make decisions and even force them over the rest of the technical crew. Even when they are the wrong decisions.
Remove the names and cultural baggage from the picture and you might see why the FUD works: big company X with expensive lawyers is sued by smaller, failing company S over IP. other big company Y and potential target, also with expensive lawyers, licenses the IP "before they get sued".
Most interpretations that don't imply Y is minimizing risk depend on a preconceived idea of what Y is like, what their strategy is and what their methods are. The bias is justified by a knowledge of the history of Y, of companies that interacted with it, and in no small amount by personal, political and technical judgement.
This is all good and nice, more than enough to understand there are more complex factors and motivations behind a Microsoft decision on the matter. But it would not be easy to convince someone to risk their business on that judgement over a half-hour discussion (before their eyes glaze over) unless you're preaching to the choir.
Re:New Strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Will proprietary software with real value still have commercial value? HEll yes, always.
Will proprietary software that does the same thing as free software have value? No, why should it?
Why should we be paying anyone money for something people are willing to do for free. Simple as that.
Look at.. Vmware. Good product. Solid. Makes money. Then we have FreeMware. Not so good. Not even close, really. VMWare definately has *value*, and lots of it.
Now, if VMWare sits on their product and does nothing but fix bugs, that situation won't last. Eventually, freemware, or someone else, might catch up, or surpass it. But all VMWare has to do is keep innovating and developing, and they can keep selling their great product.
The same goes for everything.... we all don't like windows because, hell, the only reasons we really use it are because we are forced to by software compatability... we don't see it as anyhing that adds real value.. only artificial value.
Free software will continue to set a baseline standard for software, which you have to beat significantly in order to actually sell software. That's where things are going. ANd that's a GOOD way for things to be. Nobody is saying focused, commercial programming efforts can't pay off bigtime.. they absolutely can.. butnot if you are going to make snakeoil.
Re:New Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that is is safe to assume that Linux is = to Sun on maintenence costs (most likely ==) and a great deal than MS.
WTF: its questionable claim to be free??? (Score:1, Insightful)
So the author doesn't understand what "free" means in this context. The perpetual confusion of free as in beer and free as in liberty. Most open source software may not be gratis but it is not at all questionable that it is "software libre".
Re:I doubt this'll work (Score:3, Insightful)
On the hardware side, Sun's hardware engineering and field support are far superior to most PC systems, so the only reason they might trail in a head to head competition is price. Again, no personal experience with Sun x86 platforms, but as long as they don't fall far below their quality on the SPARC platform, I would have no problem recommending these systems, particularly if cost isn't the highest rating element.
That said, I think it is pretty ironic that Sun is probably suffering the most right now from the rise of Linux (and Dell is probably the benneficiary of this movement). They have been the most "Open" of the Open Systems vendors (not to be confused with Open Source). On the other hand, they probably will survive all of this and emerge as a leaner, meaner competitor and deliver even better system solutions at even better prices. Personally, I think they are making a mistake by not fully embracing Linux, but they have a lot of people and resources working on Solaris, so it is hard to change. They may be forced to by economics, though.
Re:"Questionable Claim" (Score:3, Insightful)
If you told the author of this article you were giving him a free car, with a free warranty for parts and a substantial discount on labor, apparently his response would be "Oh yeah? What about gas?". Sheesh.
It might seem different if you have to hire a chauffeur, though.
Re:New Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also the advantage of having your techies 'fluent' on the same OS throughout the datacentre, with one partner to deal with when things go well... or go wrong.
Re:I doubt this'll work (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, most Intel servers use either Intel motherboards or Broadcom motherboards. So if vendor B is buying 2-way Xeon boxes based on Intel motherboards from an Asian assembler that puts a blue plastic shell on the motherboard, and vendor B is doing the same thing, albeit with the Asian assembler using a black plastic shell, and both vendors outsource their hardware support to the same company that specializes in low-end Intel server support, and both vendors provide Red Hat but outsource their software support to Red Hat, what is the difference, or what is the relavance of how long the the vendor has been in the market?
Your statement makes about as much sense as if Sun had switched from Seagate to Hitachi hard drives in its systems, and you said Sun is a newcomer to the Hitachi hard drive market.
2-way x86 servers are commodities. The only significant companies innovating on these are Intel, AMD, and Broadcom. Not the companies that acutually sell them.
Re:....as some geeks would like (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the people who are writing the open source code do not understand how to keep TCO costs down. The open source community is by-and-large a community of software developers who don't want to be burdened by the issues they had working for corporations. A prime example of this is the open source "release early, release often" mantra which is practically hostile to any use of open source products in the Enterprise market (which is the only market that really cares about TCO). If you release early and often you continue to introduce bugs and you never stabilize a release (and I spend a lot of time in my job dealing with 2.4.x kernels in an enterprise environment, and it is *not* a stable kernel branch -- no matter what people might think based on their limited experience with a handful of Linux boxes that they admin). By releasing early and often you also produce conniption fits with third party vendors, who need a lead time to QA test their products on the stable release and who expect the release they're targetting to be supported.
If open source software is going to compete with commercial unix products, the open source development community is going to need to grow up. They're going to need to start releasing code which becomes progressively more stable, which is more thorughly QA'd and regression tested, and which has a better development model.
I don't know if this can happen. It really requires the presence of people who have a substantial amount of control and who are getting paid to do jobs like program management that people normally don't do for free. It might happen if RedHat or IBM or another big player (or consortium of players) officially forks the Linux kernel. I don't see any way of it happening given the current development model (within the Linux kernel at any rate).
FreeBSD gives me a little bit of hope. At least the FreeBSD community seems to understand that they're not writing the code *just* for themselves and that they have a userbase that would like their code to run on servers in a stable fashion. The Linux community seems to largely be self-masturbatory developers who just want it to run faster, and don't care if their end users are getting paged at 2AM in the morning due to panics in the supposedly-stable kernel series.