Economist article on Sun's Linux Strategy

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."

New Strategy

[sonetsst]

I know this doesn't end Sun's use of linux in the market place, but why in god's name would they push solaris on the x86. Maybe it is just me, but when i can have crontab maintain servers why should i feel the need to switch to solaris?

Re:New Strategy

[salimma]

As I recall Churchill wasn't much of a lefty

If you run a heavily Sun-oriented tech shop, presumably it will be advantageous to run a single OS (well, Solaris/Sparc and Solaris/Intel) to running Solaris/Sparc and Linux/Intel; cautious companies might more easily justify purchasing Intel-based hardware if they don't have to put a new OS on it at the same time.

It is quite interesting that Oracle is to be made available on Solaris/Intel. If Sun could not keep up its CPU development - should UltraSparc IV be a dud, say - a jump to Intel (or more probably AMD64) would be easier if a customer and software base is already established.

Re:Your second point

[salimma]

Solaris is based on System V R4 and is licensed as such

So is AIX, but SCO is threatening to revoke their license (it remains to be seen whether that's legal or not) due to claims of technology transfer to Linux. Since Sun ships Linux solutions too it is conceivable that they might get entangled in the same way.

Granted, Sun does not have a high-profile involvement in Linux but the IBM case is most likely totally FUD anyway. If there turns out to be Microsoft involvement in it, then Sun is the obvious next target...

Re:Your second point

[Miguel de Icaza]

Sun is taking measures to provide source code under their community license, That doesn't matter quite as much as M$ releasing the Windos source because Sun doesn't deliberately hide their better APIs for internal use nor use deliberalely incompatible interfaces.Solaris is an open system, you don't -need- the source code. Sun has not, say, modified the way their CDE or NFS or DNS or X11 or POSIX implementation works to prevent other people's software from working with it, which a certain OTHER company has as a nasty history of ...

Sun has a history of being open with their stuff. The SPARC architecture is downloadable off the web, ferchrissakes, and there are many Sun clone vendors . Their hardware division actively works with other companies to help them port to SPARC, which was why everything and its brother ran on Sun machines in the early 90s. Their NFS protocol was documented and now used by pretty much everything. Sun machines can also use DNS and other non-Sun resolvers just as well as Sun's own NIS system.

On the other hand, there is this OTHER company who deliberately does not release documentation to outside developers, deliberately obfuscates how their stuff works, breaks other people's protocols or refuses to use them (can you completely replace NetBIOS name resolution with DNS ... I only wish. Can you replace the NTLM Domain crap?).

Re:New Strategy

[niola]

Oracle previously had a port of 8i that ran on Solaris X86, but they discontinued it due to poor adoption.

If you have access to Oracle Metalink, check out Metalink document #149914.1 from May 2001.

--Jon

MS gives credence to SCO?

[Schreck]

Microsoft has also, indirectly, aided a lawsuit that could hurt Linux. On May 19th, it said that it had licensed the rights to Unix technologies from SCO Group, a small software firm. Earlier this year, SCO sued IBM, which has made a big commitment to Linux, seeking damages of at least $1 billion ... The lawsuit had seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt by SCO to get itself bought, or bought off, by Big Blue. But the deal with Microsoft lends credence to SCO's claims and helps it financially to press them.

How does Microsoft licensing SCO technologies give SCO's lawsuit any credence. Everyone knows MS will do anything it can to hurt Linux. Is there really someone out there going "Hmm, Microsoft licensed SCO's technology, ergo, SCO has a valid case." I just have a hard time believing that.

"Questionable Claim"

[po8]

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.

"Questionable claim to be free"? Let's leave aside "free/Free" for a moment, as the author seems to indicate the former. (Let's also leave aside the grammatical correctness of the sentence, which looks more like it belongs in a /. article than in The Economist. :-)

Instead, let's ask what this "questionable claim" actually is. Hmm, does open source software have a purchase price? Not really: by definition, it costs $0. How about technical support, is that free? Why, for most open source it is: extensive online help, rapid bugfixes, etc. I know, are any and all costs related to its use zero? Why no, they are not---you still have to pay to field the software and maintain it.

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.

Although, the article was pretty well-written otherwise :-).

Sun is Java

[yog]

Sun is no longer a workstation or server company; they are the Java company. They are getting a lot of their business from Java these days--selling packages, selling Sun University courses, JavaOne, etc.

Undoubtedly, the server business continues to pay some of the bills, but this business model is in doubt; IBM can out-compete them at the high end and LinTel is eating their lunch at the low end and, increasingly, in the mid-range. They really need to reinvent themselves as an enterprise solution provider rather than a hardware provider that (for some reason) invented Java.

I think Sun should merge or form a strategic alliance with WebLogic and position themselves as a total server, middleware and web services provider with their state of the art technology. They have a huge advantage in that everyone but Microsoft supports and promotes Java, including Sun's fiercest competitors. They have tremendous domain expertise; a lot of the people who developed Java, J2EE and so forth are still working at Sun.

Alternatively, perhaps IBM should buy JavaSoft and let the rest of Sun die a quick and merciful death. IBM's stake in Java is so huge now that it's hard to imagine they are not considering this option.

Just some thoughts on a Sunday morning....

Since when was this case an economists' concern?

[BillsPetMonkey]

Since suprisingly recently. The fact that the SCO/Linux case features on the Economist radar can only be good news. Not so long ago this article wouldn't even have feature in their "in other news" section.

And they're happy to tow the geek line that SCO's case has little real merit calling it a "ham-fisted attempt by SCO to get itself bought".