Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

(Slightly Skeptical)
Solaris Enterprize Strategy Page

Instead of introduction I recommend to read the relevant part (Sun under the Linux siege ) of the chapter 4 of the Open source Pioneers book that discusses the Solaris relationship with Linux (and thus IBM) that was the counterpoint of the last five years or so.

Currently the key issue for Sun is the level of interoperability with Microsoft.  The key to this is their 2004 agreement:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, April 2, 2004 — Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced that they have entered into a broad technology collaboration arrangement to enable their products to work better together and to settle all pending litigation between the two companies. The companies have also entered into agreements on patents and other issues.

Unless Sun brass take serious steps in this direction, their competitive position is pretty slippery.  Of course low power consumption of T1 and good transactional benchmarks result is an additional plus.

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Notes: Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be expected. This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It cannot replace the best teachers and the best books. The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a living tree... Some links on older pages are broken. Please try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link (see HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate if you can mail us a correct link. Search Amazon by keywords:     Open directory Research Index

Old News ;-)

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just dropped me off at the lobby of building 10. So, I'm sitting on the floor near a power outlet and am blogging my experiences.

What an enjoyable guy! We walked across the street to a Togos sandwich shop. Little-known trivia, Togos was started by a couple of San Jose State University students. I have lots of great memories of eating in Togos over the years (there was one across the street from our high school — I graduated in 1983).

Anyway, at one point we were having such an engaged conversation I had to remind myself that he runs a company with 37,000 employees and billions in revenues. We instantly were talking like long-lost friends.

There was a serious tone to our lunch, though, we talked a lot about the business difficulties facing Sun Microsystems. They are about to layoff thousands of people.

One thing I look for in leaders, though, is willingness to take the worst of times in stride with a clear eye on what comes next. Jonathan exceeded all my ideas of what a leader should do. And he has great pride in Sun, too, and says that the business is starting to turn around.

For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun's dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that'll get posted by workers who've just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It'll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There's a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

At one point I asked him about the Business Week cover I saw (Marissa Mayer at Google was staring at both of us, being crowned by BusinessWeek as queen of innovators) and said "what innovations is Sun doing?" Later I asked him if there's something that Sun and Microsoft could innovate together on?

He told me about some of the innovations that Sun has been working on in the past few years. He's in the midst of a large-scale corporate upheaval and rebuilding.

One of the things he's proudest of is Sun's engineers found a way to dramatically lower the power consumption of their servers. How did they do that? By getting rid of things that Web servers don't need — and by slowing down the chip which didn't hurt Web performance, since most of what Web sites need is high throughput, not high turnaround time (he told me that I really care if 1,000 people can all download my blog at the same time, not that any one of those getting it a microsecond faster). He told me that they found that customers of the size of Ebay weren't using much floating point performance on its datacenters. So they removed that functionality, and other stuff. That saves power. Good for the environment, good for his customer's bottom lines, and good for Sun too.

He's deeply concerned about the amount of power that Internet sites are using. He says that for many Internet companies it's already one of their top three costs. Reduce power and heat on servers and you can save companies like Google or Ebay or, even, WordPress, a lot of money.

How could Microsoft and Sun innovate together? That's a tough one cause our businesses are aimed at different places at the moment, but we brainstormed a few places and I'm sure we'll get something going offline. The fact that we were even talking about working together demonstrates that it's a new world and that the only constant in the business world is change.

He's most passionate about the growth of content around the world. Talked about how a friend of his showed him the popularity of Indian Cricket games world-wide, something that hasn't caught on here in Silicon Valley, but has up to a billion people interested around the world. That kind of content will be delivered over the Internet, which means more business opportunities for Sun. He sees the effect that blogs, Wikis, MySpace, podcasting, and video and videoblogging are having on the growth of the Internet too and is looking for ways that Sun could help those networks grow and thrive.

Why invite me over for lunch? Cause he is seeing the deep effect that blogging is having on his company (it's helping recruitment at Sun too, even in the face of layoffs) and wanted to meet me and get to know me a little better. That's very flattering, but I too was trying to learn something about Sun that hadn't been reported already.

One thing I found out? That he's a staunch proponent of working at home. At Sun they found that people who work at home are far less likely to leave Sun than employees that have to come into the office. He sees that as a competitive advantage and doesn't understand why some companies force their employees to come into the office.

He also went into great detail with me about why Sun is in the position of having to lay people off. I found that to be fascinating behavior on the behalf of a CEO meeting with an employee of one of his fiercest competitors. He's bummed out by having to lay people off which seems trite to say when you talk about a CEO that isn't seeing his own job threatened, but he told me he grew up in a poor family and wants to put Sun into a position so it can hire back all those workers.

He won me over. I've met a few CEOs over the years and a lot of them just want to tell me their point of view. Jonathan was noticeably different: he asked ME questions about how I looked at the world. He was curious, personable, someone I could see drinking a lot of beer with and still remaining friends with. And that's my point of view from the floor of Sun Microsystems' corporate headquarters.

Next time Jonathan, you gotta come up to Microsoft and I'll buy lunch and let's take the relationship further.

[June 02, 2006 ] Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog/Sunlight is the Best Informant

I was with a big potential customer yesterday - in the Fortune 100. After a day of briefings from our technical folks, I joined the meeting to see how we were doing. I asked him and his team how much of what they'd seen was new to them.

He said, "about 70% was a complete surprise."

Ouch. That's not good.

To test, I asked, "before today, did you know that Solaris was open source, or ran on Dell, HP and IBM hardware, not just Sun's?" "Nope."

And like I said, this was a Fortune 100 opportunity.

Despite the ample advice I receive, getting through the din, especially in the world of IT, doesn't happen with a superbowl ad (can you remember a single one?), or buying every billboard in every town, or every ad word on-line. We know, we measure their effectiveness.

We know the most valued information travels by word of mouth. Through blogs, on-line reviews, or other on-line conversations. Or "kneecap to kneecap," as we sit across the table from customers in our briefing centers. And frankly, the most valuable information about Sun doesn't come from Sun, it comes from other customers.

So how do you get the word out if you don't have a $500M ad budget? To me, it's not so much about getting the word out, as letting the eyes and ears in. You can tell I'm a big fan of transparency - that's why I write a blog (with comments on, and yes, I read every one, as do a host of others at Sun). It's why I encourage others to drive the conversation in the market, as well. Transparency's at least a part of the solution. If not an outright competitive weapon.

A very wise man once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" - and in my view, exposing our internals to the outside world also helps us respond to problems more rapidly. True, we have to expose the occasional unhappy customer (I hear this one, in particular, recently became happy), but we expose them to people who can help, too - from within Sun, or within the community. We can't solve problems we don't know about. Like the good justice said, sunlight's a good disinfectant.

Which is why you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon. We're starting with just a few products, but it'll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise offerings.

What's the risk? That we're exposing ourselves to criticism? That we may have on display the fact that one product or another isn't perfect? (That our competitors may try to rate all our products?)

Nope.

The far bigger risk is that we'd meet another customer surprised by what we had to offer. Unaware that our systems were 5 times as energy efficient as our competitors. That Solaris was free, open source, and available on Dell or HP. Or that Thumper was about to reset the economics of the storage industry.

And to my mind, sunlight's not just the best disinfectant.

It's the best informant, too.

From a voice you'll trust more than ours - your own.

[May 4, 2006] InformationWeek Weblog Sun's R&D Chief Gets Out His Magnifying Glass

Scott McNealy's decision to cede his Sun Microsystems CEO title to his protégée, Jonathan Schwartz, last week after 22 years at the helm has grabbed most of the computer industry's interest around the storied company. When pressed on how his tenure would differ from McNealy's, Schwartz downplayed any shift in strategy. "The network is the computer," then and now, he said on a conference call with reporters.

But an overlooked artifact of the CEO switch is Schwartz's order for a top-to-bottom engineering review of Sun's technology projects over the next three months, headed by Greg Papadopoulos, who took on the new title of executive VP of research and development at Sun last week. When I talked to Papadopoulos late last week, he said no Sun engineer will escape his scrutiny. Could there be more changes in the offing than appeared at first glance?
 

Sun made its change at the top after losing $217 million during its third quarter ended March 26, though revenues increased 21% to $3.2 billion, largely on sales of storage and x86 servers. According to Schwartz, Sun's big brands--Sparc, Solaris, Java, and Sun Fire servers running Advanced Micro Devices chips--"have yet to really bear fruit and deliver the value they ultimately can." It's Papadopoulos' job to unlock that value.

Sun spends about $2 billion annually on research and development, pouring a greater percentage of revenue into R&D (16.5% in Q3) than many of its competitors. But the budget needs some fixing, shifting funds from engineering projects that emphasize the performance of single computers running alone to technology that can boost the performance of a whole network of systems--increasingly the way IT managers run their business apps. "As we go through and look at the R&D, we say, 'Is this old school or new school?' " says Papadopoulos. "You can't do that informally." Designing systems meant to operate in clusters and elevating the importance of software delivered as a Web service rather than shipped in a box are part of the plan. The ability to do so will define "what it really means to be a computer company" in the next few years, he says.

There are signs Sun is on the right track. The company recently delivered its new UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor, which gains performance through packaging hardware on a single chip that can run 32 simultaneous application threads, each in its own Java virtual machine. Those could be search engine requests, Oracle transactions, or other popular workloads. And Niagara chips run on about the same amount of electricity as a household light bulb--cooler than Intel or AMD parts in tests. Sun has been trying to sell T1-based servers to Google, and though no deal has been reached yet, "there's no doubt this stuff is meshed well with the stuff they run," Papadopoulos says. Sun also just "taped out" Niagara 2, or sent its final design in for manufacturing. That chip could ship some time next year.

Earlier this week, Sun said it would deliver a 128-bit file system for Solaris in June, creating a computing runway for the next 10 years.

Sparc and Solaris are still vibrant brands, and Sun's Sparc business actually grew during Q3, according to Papadopoulos. "This stuff has differentiated value in the market," he says. Still, customers aren't buying in the numbers they once were--Sun's share of the $51.7 billion worldwide server market last year slipped again to less than 10%, its fifth straight year of decline, according to market research company Gartner.

To get Sun's R&D more in line with customers' desires, Papadopoulos figures he'll review some 500 projects under way at Sun. "There are 9,000 engineers at the company, and you get asked the question, 'What are they all doing?' " he says. Along the way, he'll identify opportunities for cuts. As for whether projects get axed or management uses a lighter hand to redistribute funding among projects, "that's Jonathan's call," says Papadopoulos.

Schwartz's public stance so far has been to execute on the plans he and McNealy have already put in place. But look a little closer and it appears Sun is actually tinkering with its formula to try to cure what ails it.

[Apr 26, 2006] Will Schwartz add more Windows to Sun

Perhaps the changing of the guard at Sun Microsystems Inc. was no shock to some. Now pundits can dish over whether or not it will be the start of a new era at Sun – and one that might mean more collaboration with Microsoft.

The company said earlier this week that CEO Scott McNealy was stepping aside so chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz could take the reigns. Not everyone thinks the new CEO will bring big changes. Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata Inc., Nashua, N.H., said he doubted the change was much more than Schwartz taking over a role he had already started and fine tuned even while McNealy was in control.

Major moves, including the adoption of x86 architecture, the move to AMD's Opteron processor on low-end hardware and the open sourcing of the Solaris operating system, all bore the mark of Schwartz, Haff said.

And more importantly Schwartz's background, based in software, is one that could see some interesting collaboration in the future -- mainly with Microsoft. Relations between Sun and Microsoft have improved in the past few years -- the "sword has been sheathed," Haff said – and have included healthy doses of interoperability work between the two companies.

The interoperability reflects what the end users have been demanding, said Tony Iams, a senior analyst with Rye Brook, N.Y.-based IDEAS International Inc., and now the idea of pre-installing Windows Server onto Sun boxes is not unthinkable.

"Now that Sun is with x86, to realistically compete in that market you have to have some level of support for Windows," Iams said. "If Apple [Computer] can come in and support Windows, then it makes even more sense for Sun to do so too."

Broad support for Windows would also help Sun stem the flow of lost customers who have defected from Solaris to Linux thanks to free migration programs offered by IBM and Hewlett Packard, said Charles King, founder of Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT Research.

However, King said that Sun has made inroads with x86 in the interim with an aggressive campaign to present its Galaxy servers, based on AMD's Opteron processor. And while not as pronounced as the gains in the hardware business, Sun has also seen up ticks in popularity with ISVs thanks to its efforts into open source software.

"Typically systems vendors like Sun don't make a huge amount of money selling open source software, but they do manage to make a healthy profit through alliances with the ISVs and by selling ancillary products to support the open source ISV applications," King said.

As for Java, the pundits said they believed Sun will continue to be careful about retaining control and managing Java for the time being. Schwartz has publicly said he has considered options regarding Java, but to date the company has been reluctant to open source the technology.  

ScienceDirect - Business Horizons, Volume 49, Issue 1, Pages 1-86 (January-February 2006)

A personal view of Sun Microsystems  • DISCUSSION
Pages 17-20
John C. Shoemaker
SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (72 K)

Slashdot Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing Sun sold Tarantella to ProPalms.

Sun's x86 strategist steers straight ahead Newsmakers CNET News.com

Jonathan Schwartz Solaris is the Future of Unix - OSNews.com

Jonathan reminded us that the Test-Drive version of Solaris is available today for everyone to download and try out. The final version of Solaris (commercial release) will be in January and that would be the time that the source will be completely opened as well. He would like to see Solaris scale from small embedded machines (submarines, hospitals) to big mainframes.

Jonathan does not believe that the OpenSolaris will have an impact on BSD's or Linux's growth. He doesn't see these platforms as competitors per se, in terms of growth, but he believes that all these platforms will equally evolve in the future in their own ways, because there is no hammer that fits all nails. Some needs require highly scalable systems, other more secure, other more latency-friendly etc.

Instead, the two companies that he sees as definite competitors are Red Hat and mostly, Microsoft. But he is confident that OpenSolaris will help the Solaris platform in general to keep its robustness and good name in the Enterprise. In fact, he maintains that Solaris has better scalability, affordability and security than any Microsoft OS product currently, plus it runs Java --which is truly cross platform-- delivering services that .NET would be able to deliver only on Microsoft products. Points like these make the Sun platform very valuable.

And speaking of the competition, he mentioned that Apple's focus is not the Enterprise at large and therefore, not a competitor: "That's not Steve's focus". Jonathan has several Macs to his home and his family owns some more too. We should not forget where Jonathan comes from, either: the NeXTSTEP community, right before Sun purchased his software company. Jonathan likes Mac OS X a lot and he believes that Apple should continue to innovate in its field and continue create "beautiful and elegant products".

Jonathan says that the main focus of Solaris in terms of the architecture it runs on will continue to be primarily SPARC, accompanied by 32bit and 64bit x86. He invites the open source community to port Solaris to other architectures too, but he doesn't see much commercial value in doing so. For example, he believes that the Itanium is not a durable architecture, while IBM's Power5 is so proprietary that it doesn't make it a good candidate for a port/business. Instead, he welcomes companies to use Solaris on purpose-built embedded system devices.

We asked about his thoughts on Red Hat re-implementing the Java platform from scratch and the implications that would have for Sun. He believes that there is no danger of Red Hat going very far within the Enterprise with this new project because of several reasons, including the fact that it would be a "tough sell" for established customers of the Java platform including Samsung, Nokia and Google. In fact, he fears that IBM is the one that would have the most trouble from the whole Red Hat-Java deal, because as they use Red Hat for their POWER projects, using a non-certified Java version could create potential runtime problems.

The obvious question, then, was why Sun doesn't "Free up" their version of Java, and the answer is that Java is already "open," but not under a more liberal license because Sun doesn't want to open up the potential for a fork. The same fear is not present in the OpenSolaris situation because Solaris is more closely defined and controlled by Sun, while Java can be shaped by external forces easier, and so Sun doesn't want to take that risk. With over 2 billion devices worldwide running Java Sun is 100% committed to ensuring that anything 'stamped' Java is compatible. Folks really depend on that assurance.

Sun does seem to have a beef with Red Hat; that much was obvious from our conversation. Jonathan believes that Red Hat's ways in the business are not fully honest. He believes that Red Hat locks Enterprise customers in, just like Microsoft does, by steadily moving away from the LSB, by patching and forking code (including using a very non-standard Linux kernel) and so applications get certified or only work in the Red Hat codebase and no other Linux distro. Such an example is Oracle, where they do not support any Linux distro other than Red Hat-based ones. Jonathan believes that Red Hat, by differentiating the code so much, has created its own incompatible platform, and is therefore virtually pushing customers to continue use Red Hat instead of Debian or Gentoo or other.

We asked Jonathan about his opinion on patents and he summarized it thus: Patents are useful, but most of them are "silly" and unfairly approved (in the US). In its official position, Sun respects Intellectual Property, and as such they will offer indemnification to all new versions of Solaris.

Lastly, we asked Jonathan about his opinion on the future of Unix and he sees a "vibrant and dynamic" future for all "branches and leaves of the same tree", including BSD and Linux ("which comes from the same swamp") but most importantly --surprise, surprise-- Solaris. He looks forward to a strong community build to help out with the development of this high-integrity, robust and promising platform.

Linux News Commentary The Importance of Solaris 10

The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that they should dedicate a machine with at least two US3 or later CPUs to Solaris 10 and use it to train their people on Solaris 10 and DTrace by having them test all major systems.

It's easy to explain the value of stuff like that to management. For the IT people, you just talk about combining hardware and licensing dollar savings with increased deployment flexibility -- and for senior management you correlate software quality with reductions in error and failure risks. Either way, you're really talking about software which enables operational improvements within Sun's existing customer base, and that, I'm sure, is why Sun is energetically marketing these new capabilities.

Look a bit deeper, however, and there's so much more in Solaris 10 that the release should eventually become known as SunOS 3.0. (Note: SunOS 1.0 went to release 4.1.4 with its successor, Solaris, initially known as SunOS 5.0 and then relabeled as Solaris 2. Despite marketing's best efforts, therefore, releases up to 2.8 were publicly known as 2.X ,with 8 and 9 still known internally as 2.8 and 2.9, respectively.)

Deeper Innovations

Hot, new intrinsic capabilities like DTrace, ZFS and the ability to run Linux binaries are the realizations of deeper technological innovations like microstate accounting. Solaris 10 brings a lot of those out of the labs and into production environments where they'll receive the kind of intensive real world testing that will ultimately determine how important they are. Consider, for example, this list of Solaris 10 top 11-20 new features put together by Adam Leventhal (one of the key developers behind DTrace):

1. libumem -- the tool for debugging dynamic allocation problems; oh, and it scales as well or better than any other memory allocator.
2. pfiles(1) with file names -- you can get at the file name info through /proc, too; very cool.
3. Improved coreadm(1M) -- core files are now actually useful on other machines, administrators and users can specify the content of core files.
4. System V IPC -- no more clumsy system tunables and reboots, it's all dynamic, and -- guess what? -- faster too.
5. kmdb -- if you don't care, OK, but if you do care, you really, really care: mdb(1)'s cousin replaces kadb(1M).
6. Watchpoints -- now they work and they scale.
7. pstack(1) for java -- see java stack frames in a JVM or core file and through Dtrace.
8. pmap(1) features -- see thread stacks, and core file content.
9. per-thread p-tools -- apply pstack(1) and truss(1) to just the threads you care about.
10. Event Ports -- a generic API for dealing with heterogeneous event sources.

Things like these are invisible to IT management and of little importance to the press, but this is the stuff on which technology revolutions like DTrace and ZFS are built. Thus, their presence in this release signals the importance of Solaris 10, not as an end product but as a work in progress.

Systemwide Functionality

To me it seems that Sun is driving toward what I think of as Plan-9 compliance; not at the code level but in terms of systemwide functionality. Plan 9, you might recall, is a kind of second generation Unix liberated from the single machine focus of the original design to make full use of multiple machines on a network. Originally, Sun's marketing people said that "the network is the computer"; realistically, Plan 9 reverses that to make it: "the computer is the network" -- and that's exactly what's going on with Solaris.

Adam Leventhal's list, above, reflects the achievements of people working to put in place the foundations for future software, while the forthcoming Niagara and later SPARC designs do the same thing at the hardware level -- putting the equivalent of a traditional 32-way SMP box into a single processor.

Bring them together in production systems and what do you get? The ability to organize your business  around a single physical computer redundantly implemented in processors spread across your network -- meaning that a lot of business processes now limited by technology costs and software complexity can be simplified right down to affordability. That's what Solaris 10 is really about, and the 10-year impact is likely to be like nothing we've seen before.

LXer Sun versus Linux The Real Story

by Tom Adelstein
November 22, 2004

On December 01, 1999, 32bitsonline.com published an article in which I chronicled the emergence of Windows NT from a small five percent share of the server market to approximately 50 percent. During the period, Novell fell from around an 80 percent share of the PC nodes to around ten percent. With Novell flattened, Microsoft started to go after UNIX until interrupted by Federal Anti-Trust actions over the Netscape Browser.

The article called "Did Microsoft Try to Kill UNIX?" no longer exists and neither do the many links that documented Microsoft's famous ascent in the server space. Evidence of the article's existence still remains at this link. You will notice this remnant:

"Microsoft claims that the United States Justice Department has interfered with innovation in the computer industry. One can't help but wonder what people would call the collective effort of the developers who created Linux."

 

In December 1999, Microsoft Windows held a 41 percent share of the server OS market globally up from 38 percent in 1998. Surprisingly, Linux had showed a 27 percent share of new server shipments that year while NetWare held 17 and UNIX 14 percent as reported by market researcher IDC.

But go back to 1995 and you'll discover that Novell had a 65.6 percent market share while Microsoft had approximately 6 percent and OS/2 held steady at around 15 percent according to periodicals from the time. During that period, Sun Microsystems held a 40 percent share of the RISC UNIX workstation market. Go back a little further and Novell NetWare and UNIX owned the entire server market give or a take a few percent.

What happened to Novell? In almost missing the Internet, Microsoft scrambled. In fact, Bill Gates saw what Sun Microsystems had done and jumped through hoops to get into the game. Novell missed the Internet entirely until hiring Sun's Internet architect Eric Schmidt in 1997. It was just a little too late and still took Novell time to gear up and once it had, Schmidt went to work at Google. Many people who worked in the industry ten years ago remember how the Internet saved Sun Microsystems and caused her to hold the most prominent place in the server operating system market.

Along Comes GNU/Linux

During the Federal prosecution of Microsoft, which began in October 1997 and ended in November 2001, Linux rose to prominence. Microsoft needed a competitor. But the young upstart Linux didn't even have an officially supported graphical Internet browser at the time. As Microsoft came to realize the serious intent of the Department of Justice and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, Redmond began to act a little more convinced of the prowess of Linux. A few nudges in the press and a few attacks on Linux and soon others began to look into the seriousness of Linux.

Once, Microsoft escaped the threat of a corporate breakup, Linux had gone from a user base of two to approximately twenty million. In addition, Linux became a favorite of IBM, HP and thousands of value added resellers.

As Microsoft shook off its anti-trust haze and looked around, it began to focus its attention on growing its server business once again. NetWare posed no threat and IBM had agreed to stop marketing OS/2. But, IBM embraced Linux and began taking market share from wherever it could. Microsoft had a formidable adversary in the server space in IBM.

Through Linux, IBM made refugees of the Santa Cruz Project, HP's UNIX and to a certain extent Microsoft's NT. IBM also trained its eyes on long time nemesis Sun Microsystems and actively undercut Sun's hardware and software prices. Then something happened that makes little sense: IBM turned from its attack on Microsoft and focused entirely on Sun Microsystems. IBM sent its entire Linux team to Siberia, dropped its plans for a Linux desktop and became obsessed with Sun. This served Microsoft well. IBM would continue to compete with Microsoft but not to the extent that it wanted to endanger Sun and perhaps turn them into the Data General of the early twenty first century.

Enter SCO

Through SCO, Microsoft succeeded in transferring the angst of the open-source community from itself to other entities primarily the SCO Group and Sun Microsystems.

The SCO phenomenon doesn't make sense when you attempt to connect the dots. Microsoft could not have asked for a better situation in which to display its agility at manipulating perception.

C/NET reported on the Sun transaction in June 2003. Explaining the situation, C/NET wrote:

 

SCO's Unix licensing plan got a major boost of publicity in May when Microsoft announced its decision to license Unix from SCO, but Sun actually was the first company to sign on. SCO and Sun confirmed the licensing deal on Wednesday.

The pact, signed earlier this year, expanded the rights Sun acquired in 1994 to use Unix in its Solaris operating system...Sun's expanded license permits Sun to use some software from Unix System V Release 4 for software components called drivers, which let computers use hard drives, network cards and other devices. Sun needed the software for its version of Solaris that runs on Intel servers, Sun spokesman Brett Smith said. A source familiar with the deal said the new contract was signed in February, but neither Sun nor SCO would comment.

Microsoft could not have asked for better timing. Seizing the opportunity to seed SCO in its efforts to disrupt Linux, they bundled another enemy into the fray: Sun Microsystems. Then, to shift the attention away from themselves further, Microsoft cleverly paid Sun money for the damages owed in court losses by hosting a "love-in" between the Sun and Microsoft CEO's. Microsoft then announced a licensing deal where Sun would receive intellectual property it could use to connect to Microsoft servers.

Suddenly, Sun became the target of open-source angst. Microsoft used a clever psychological trick to transfer the hatred of technologists from themselves to others. In the eyes of the media and others, Microsoft and Sun became sudden partners against Linux.

And just to show how good a partner they really have become, the same Microsoft has made a major effort to undermine the Linux wins Sun made in China. How? By trying to scare the Chinese with threats of patent infringement.

Sun Plays Checkers, Microsoft Plays Chess

I don't wish to disparage Sun, but their press relations need as much of an overhaul as their product line. Known internally as fascists, they could have served as campaign advisers to any flip-flopping politician one might choose. Here's Sun management opening themselves to the community with a blogsphere and yet no one inside the company can talk to the press, write an article or issue a press release without the guiding hand of the Sun media relations. What's the difference between that and saying I don't own a SUV but my family does? Or, saying I voted for the Bill before I voted against it?

Sun began work on its Linux Desktop in September 2002. It opened sourced its Cobalt software, provides the major support for Gnome, purchased StarOffice and gave the code to the community, supports Mozilla and pays a ridiculous sum for open-source projects at Collab.net. Now, people see them as the enemy. Let's just say that Sun's media relations team has done a wonderful job of confusing the public, making the company seem like an enemy of open-source, stressing proprietary software and embarrassing management. Way to go.

Is Sun against Linux?

In September, O'Reilly and Associates published a book written by Sam Hiser and me called "Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop". In actually, it could have taken the name "Exploring the Linux Desktop" or "Exploring Linux with JDS". We settled on the Sun distribution of the Linux desktop because it provided the best migration and management tools for Microsoft users. Also, Sun provided us with support, which we couldn't get from other distributions of Linux. Let's say Sun cooperated with us.

All parties involved in the book needed convincing that Sun had a long-term and proper commitment to Linux. We did extensive due diligence and came away feeling we made the right choice. Writing and publishing the book required a major commitment on our part and O'Reilly's. The technical book market requires more precision today than ever. You cannot just throw a book out there and expect it to sell. So, we felt comfortable with the Sun Linux team.

Note: The "A" players in the Linux business all had a chance to have their own distribution in the name of the book. Some even had an inside advantage. At decision time, JDS prevailed. As someone who put eight months into the project and helped form a community support web site, Sun's floundering around on the PR front has disappointed me, personally and professionally.

Recently, I saw a glimmer of light with regard to Sun regaining its deserved community standing. In Jonathan's Blog, he explained the company's commitment to Linux:

Our desktop efforts, and linux product strategy, are well ahead of the cynics in the industry - and are helping us make progress on the globe's ambitions for a truly cheap PC. We've tried working with a few of the larger PC OEMs, but they, unlike WalMart, aren't all that interested in lowering prices in the PC industry. They're trying to maintain margins, not make PCs more affordable. Bridge the digital divide? I doubt that's on Dell's list of strategic priorities. Hear this: it is certainly on ours. It's even good for our business.

And before more of the conspiracy theories show up, let me quash (or start) a few of them.

In addition to JDS/linux, yes, we are committed to JDS/Solaris. An open source Solaris, with its security and virtualization infrastructure, is a perfect match for JDS. And as Red Hat's rhetoric continues to alienate customers and the open source community, we're finding a welcome audience for bringing an open source Solaris 10 to new markets. Competition is a good thing for the open source movement. Those who truly believe in open source welcome competition - those hiding behind marketing veneer and vendor lock-in hate it.

Should UNIX Go?

Left with the choice between only Microsoft and Linux, I cannot get comfortable. Microsoft looks like they may have gross revenues of $36 billion. Novell projects around $1 billion and Red Hat around $125 million. With Sun in the mix, you have an $11 Billion player.

I don't see much complaining from the open-source community about IBM selling a mix of operating systems including OS400, which you need to run Linux on their iSeries (AS400) platform. They continue to sell AIX and no one complains.

HP and SGI, other major Linux OEM's, sell UNIX and Microsoft and you don't see any flames against them. Contrary to Jonathan's claims, HP denies they have discontinued their version of UNIX. Given the chance to sell HP-UX or IRIX, neither company will say no.

Another argument that favors keeping UNIX involves the installed base. UNIX has a massive base of users in health care, government, the military, education, manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial services. Linux cannot replace UNIX entirely. As the director of distributed computing at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Joseph Panfil related in this issue of ComputerWorld:

A key issue with the Merc's use of Linux is support. With Sun, Panfil says, the Merc deals with a mature and responsive support organization that will immediately fly out a kernel expert if needed. But he says he thinks the Merc's Linux vendor, Red Hat Inc., needs to improve its support. Currently, he says, Red Hat emphasizes purchasing more products as a way to fix problems. "When there are issues, they need to step up better," Panfil says.

Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's vice president of open-source affairs, says he understands Panfil's concerns; he acknowledges that his company is still learning and says it is making changes.

Tiemann says that Red Hat's goal is to sell products upfront and that the important thing is that when the Merc had problems, they were solved. "Ultimately, Red Hat was able to dig into its technical knowledge and expertise ... and help that customer get to the place that they wanted," he says.

Ultimately, Red Hat may become a larger player in the market. Today, it just doesn't have the bandwidth to compete with extant companies. If you start looking around at the existing players they all have signficant ties to Microsoft with the exception of Sun. And while Microsoft has helped create the perception that Sun is a partner, the guys in the bullpen haven't bought it. In fact, of the major players only Sun is a UNIX company first and foremost. They don't depend on Microsoft for their air supply like IBM, HP, Dell and others.

Final Thoughts

Some people may find it difficult to understand that in baseball, I'm a Yankees fan. Living in Dallas that may not make much sense. I learned some time ago that George Steinbrenner doesn't hit, catch or throw. He even has made many enemies along his career path as the Yankee's skipper. He does find and pay for the talent. I don't have to like him to like his players.

Using the analogy of the Yankees, I tend to look at the team and not the executives. I personally like the Sun Linux team and the people working on OpenSolaris. I like it that they're making Grub the bootloader for Solaris 10 and enabling Linux apps for their main stream customers. Those items work for me. Spelling Linux with a small "l" doesn't. In fact, I would consider it a personal favor if the blogger that does that starting acknowledging the community that disrupted Microsoft's technological dominance. Scare 'em all, I say!

[Nov 19, 2004] Sun will shine again and leave Linux in its shade Not many open source aficionados will realize the impact, but by making Solaris 10 free and capable of operating on any kind of hardware, Sun is making a coup in the server market.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a technical expert. Although this might be a handicap it could very well be a positive in looking at the issue of Sun versus Linux in the server business from a decision maker's point of view.

Until today, the discussion around Linux pushed by Red Hat and recently by Novell after it took over Suse has been around the risks and opportunitites of the open source model versus the costs and slow adaptation of the proprietary model.

Opponents of open source software always argued that due to its nature there is a risk that version control, compatibility, future development and support is not guaranteed and could leave companies who use it at some point with a free but outdated system that is difficult to maintain.

Companies like Red Hat and Novell and on occasion other big players have tried to take away these arguments by committing to the open source model and vowed to make it work. Despite their efforts and some success, there still is a lot of skepticism within corporate IT departments and as a result Linux is not taking the market by storm.

With the decision by Sun to give away their latest version of their software, Solaris 10 for free all of these concerns have evaporated in one blow in favor of the now open source and compatible Solaris 10 supported by Sun.

Looking at the advantage of going the Sun route versus the Linux route it is hard to see why any IT executive would chose to switch to Linux.

• The Solaris software is of proven quality and at least equal or better then Linux and the open source model will assure that it stays up there.
• By making it work with competing hardware platforms, there is no reason anymore to switch software to facilitate lower hardware costs.
• Sun with Solaris has already a large installed base and by becoming free and open source there is no reason for existing Solaris users to switch to Linux.
•  Sun has a proven reputation in terms of quality of support. This should be at least as good or better then that of the Linux supporters.
• Because Sun by default is the only designated party managing the open source software, there will be no risk of a version bonanza with multiple incompatible versions.
• Again as a non technical person, the decision for me would be simple, I would go with Solaris unless I was already using Linux; Why take risks when I can choose a proven, high quality solution at comparable costs?

As a result Linux will probably not grow much beyond its current market share of about 10 % leaving Red Hat and especially Novell with a big problem

Of course I might very well be overlooking something here, if so, please let me and other readers know by posting your opinion in a reaction (see below).

Sun CEO takes a swing at, well, everything

McNealy, visiting customers and the press in Toronto on Nov. 5, bristled at the suggestion that Sun was pressured into making its latest version of the Solaris operating system (OS) available to open source developers.

“Pressure? It fascinates me how people think the world operates, that I’m some sort of politician running for office. There are absolute legal issues,” McNealy said, pointing out that Sun had to rid the OS of some proprietary code before open sourcing it.

On Nov. 15 Sun plans to unveil Solaris 10, the first example of the OS to be available on an open-source basis. It features technology called Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a way for administrators to tweak the platform for maximum performance. Solaris 10 also sports “containers” that isolate applications for further performance improvement, and a new TCP/IP stack that Sun says provides efficient communication processing.

McNealy said Solaris 10 is merely the latest in a long line of Sun contributions to the open source crowd.

“We’re the number-one donator of code to the open source community on the planet,” McNealy said. “To say that we need to be pressured — we invented open source, gang. That’s a little Al Gore-ish. The number one donator of open source code is (University of California) Berkeley. Know where all that came from? (Former Sun chief scientist) Bill Joy, who invented open source while at Berkeley with the BSD licence. We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix before Linus Torvalds was out of diapers.”

McNealy took IBM Corp. to task for high OS operating costs. He said Sun could offer Solaris 10 at a price of US$1 per CPU, per hour — customers would pay just a greenback for 60 minutes of access to the platform.

“IBM has…300,000 employees and they’re hiring more,” McNealy said, explaining why he thinks Big Blue can’t match Sun’s metric. “Where’s their dollar per CPU-hour? They can’t do it, because they’re at more than a dollar per CPU-hour just in pension costs.”

McNealy said Sun would offer Solaris containers in an application service provider (ASP) model, whereby the company serves up the OS packages via a data centre, and enterprises would access the containers online.

The data centre is an “N1” environment. N1 is Sun’s server load-balancing and virtualization model that aims to improve server utilization rates. Industry analysts have said most servers operate at just 15 per cent of their capacity. Servers in an N1 environment can at 80 per cent, according to Sun.

Sun’s goal is to become less of a front-line tech provider and more of a background operator, McNealy said, likening his firm’s future to the way certain other gear makers do business. “Nobody chooses Lucent or Nortel or Alcatel as your switch environment. You just sign up. You don’t know what’s on the back end.”

Sun has faced problems recently. In April the company recorded a US$760 million loss for Q3 2004. The company laid off 3,500 employees. Sun ousted Neil Knox, the executive vice-president of low-end servers, Clark Masters, executive vice-president of high-end servers, and Mark Tolliver, chief strategy and marketing officer.

Things got better in the fourth quarter as Sun landed US$795 million in the black, but in October the company recorded a US$174 million loss for Q1 2005.

McNealy put a positive spin on the most recent numbers, pointing out that Sun has US$7.4 billion in the bank, and Q1 would have been profitable if not for unusual charges, such as a US$92 million cheque written to Eastman Kodak Co. to settle a court case.

McNealy said the ASP Solaris model is temporary, merely a way to “irritate the market” in the hopes of convincing service providers like Bell Canada and Telus Corp. to create their own N1 data centres and serve up Solaris containers. So far not one Canadian service provider has signed on.

[Nov 8, 2004] Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One

• For organizations supporting between 1- 400 users
• Databases up to 500 Gb of Data
• Either $149 per Named User (minimum of 5 Users)
• Or $4995 per CPU (Maximum of two CPUs) for unlimited use
• Fast Installation and Configuration, with Built-in Automated Management
• Suitable for all types of Data, and all Applications
• Basic replication capabilities for Branch Office environments.
• The performance, availability, security and reliability you've come to expect from Oracle
• Fully upgradeable to Oracle Database 10g Standard and Enterprise Editions

[Nov 8, 2004] Open-Source Path Not an Option for Oracle, Exec Says - Computerworld

[Nov 4, 2004] Stone Rolls Away From Novell By Michael Singer   Chris Stone, who was instrumental in Novell's acquisition of SUSE Linux, has left for other pursuits, the company said Thursday. No successor has been named.

Stone served as Vice Chairman of the Office of the CEO and was one of the most visible figures in the Provo, Utah-based company's forays into open source. Stone had been responsible for engineering, product management and alliances, the company said. One of his last projects was getting Novell (Quote, Chart) to join the IBM-backed Eclipse Project.

"It is with some regret that I have decided to leave Novell and pursue other professional opportunities," Stone said in a statement. "I am proud of my work and accomplishments at Novell, but now is the time in my career to do something else, and I look forward to new challenges. Novell is strategically well positioned to remain a viable and significant vendor in the enterprise software space."

Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman said he will oversee Stone's responsibilities on an interim basis.

"We thank Chris for his service to Novell over the past two and one half years," Messman said in a statement. "He made significant contributions to changes in our strategic direction, and his vision and energy will be missed. We wish him well."

Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL, who worked closely together with Stone after Novell joined OSDL, also offered his condolences.

"Chris Stone has played a key role in the acceleration of Linux, and we wish him all the best," Cohen said in a statement. "Stone was instrumental in Novell's acquisition of SUSE and in joining and taking a leadership role with OSDL."

The news barely impacted the company's stock, as shares of Novell ended the day up 1.1 percent, or 8 cents, at $7.18.

Comment from Linuxtoday:
 

tone ( Nov 5, 2004, 23:51:51 )

I never heard of this guy before, but I will tell you what: Novell is a great company poised to do big things...however, I have the sense that they have a real lack of direction -- that is, they are all dressed up with no where to go. So, to me, that usually means executives with little or no ideas, or executives with so many competing ideas that there is no coherence to the business. For example, the Suse product, should be much further along in terms of quality and functionality, after a year or so under Novell's tutalege. I just see them re-releasing the same thing over and over again -- the consumer is going to not to want to pay $70 every 3 months for that (!!) The departure of a senior exec from such an environment should be seen as a great weight lifting from the back of Novell and a reason to buy more stock. John Bailo Texeme Construct http://texeme.com

Why Sun's JDS deserves a try Tech News on ZDNet.

Something rather strange happened earlier this month. Sun released -- but did not announce -- a Solaris-based version of Release 2 of its Java Desktop System (JDS). Given the significance of JDS R2, for which a Linux-based version has existed since May 2004, why would Sun avoid drawing attention to this release?

Though it comes with an operating system (Linux or Solaris), JDS' primary value proposition is as a productivity tool. JDS is no Microsoft Office, but it does address most productivity needs for most users and, in what may be an advantage to some but disadvantage to others, it often does so in an MS-Office-incompatible way. (That incompatibility may be rectified as a result of a recent cross-licensing agreement between Microsoft and Sun.)

At a subscription price of $50 per year (officially, it's $100, but the $50 promo price shows no signs of changing), any software product that includes an operating system (Novell's SuSE Linux or Sun's Solaris 9, both for x86), a full-blown productivity suite (StarOffice), Exchange-compatible mail and calendaring (via Novell's Ximian Evolution Client), a complete suite of Java development tools, and upgrade protection via automatic updates (the key benefit of the annual subscription), is a bargain.

Talkback - ZDNet I admire Sun more and more every day.

In the past, I often thought Sun was shooting itself in the foot with their "we must get Microsoft" attitude and actions. Today I see Sun having settled their differences with MS to the always popular tune, "north of a billion dollars by a fair piece", grasped they can't be a CPU company effectively in today's market, developed Java with community involvement while maintaining ownership/control, recognized the value of Solaris if positioned/priced properly, supported open source where it makes sense, and made the decision to not be a services company ala IBM.

I've seen lots of posts about the "Sun setting" but I honestly believe Sun is turning the company around and by offering multiple ways to buy/lease/rent/subscribe/use software they are introducing alternatives to the more traditional methods and that's a winner for consumers. Some would argue their marketing is too fragmented and going in different directions, to that I would say that sometimes, especially in a stagnant market, you have no choice but to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

Oh, and not to make a dig against Linux but if Sun plays Solaris on the X86 right then all bets are off. With Sun's financial power and technical know how, a serious contender in the proprietary OS market is all but a sure thing. In all my contacts with people using Solaris, I have never heard any serious negatives about it and that's saying a lot.

Last, I find it striking that the author suggests a very cheap PC (or device?) based on the technology outlined, and that Steve Ballmer said much the same thing just last week. Two very different views of the market, in fact almost polar opposite views, arriving at the same conclusion. Now tell me how scary that is...

Sun Responds to HP We stand by our opinions -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse