Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times) [LWN.net]

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:14 UTC (Thu) by dw (subscriber, #12017)
Parent article: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Solaris, he said, has almost no new deployments

You know, other than the minor, gentle upgrade churn it enjoys from its established base as the OS of choice in technology laden, cash rich industries such as banking.

and is a legacy operating environment

WTF? Your mom is a legacy operating environment. Linux and Windows have yet to gain something like a useable, well documented DTrace equivalent for one.

offered by a company with financial difficulties.

My understanding of Sun's "financial difficulties" amounts to a conversation I had with a bunch of Sun interns while camping somewhere high up Yosemite in California. I was left with the impression that although Sun's income isn't great, it's sitting on a massive cash pile. Looking at their last SEC filing seems to confirm this. If I had $2.282 billion in cash I certainly wouldn't consider myself out of the game.

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Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:41 UTC (Thu) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link]

Having money is not the same as being able to spend it to fund development.

Other than that, yes - premature gloating is indeed decidedly unhelpful.

But then, DTrace is only a technology detail, as is ZFS (see btrfs). The question is not about short-term or even mid-term features, but about scalability and sustainability of the (development) model.

And I would agree with Zemlin then; on that side, Linux has a clear lead. Sun has deep pockets, but at the end of the day, it is still just one company. They leverage projects from the FOSS community elsewhere already,because of the advantages this has for them (lower cost of development etc), essentially running a mixed-source shop.

And so I would predict that it is only a matter of time until they apply the same to other parts of their OS - say, the kernel - as well.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 25, 2008 22:51 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

2 Billion is NOTHING. It's a single acquisition. Sure they could lose a minor amount of money for years with the cash on hand but without growth the stock tanks and they become an acquisition target. The danger isn't SUN going out of business tomorrow it's that they will be bought out by someone or that they will slowly bleed themselves dry in much the same manner a certain company by the name of Santa Cruz Operation (The original one) or SGI did.

UNIX, the proprietary version, is dead. It was dieing when SGI and SCO got into trouble and it's long since dead. The only people still using it are the ones that were already using it. Based on trends most of them will switch to Linux by the end of the next decade as they upgrade. The proof of this is to look at IBM. AIX for the legacy customers, all systems can run Linux so the customers can switch to Linux as they convert applications from AIX. The proof is also in NASDAQ switching to an entire Linux backend a few years ago, a contract I might add that SUN used to hold and I believe IBM now holds. Legacy clients are switching, and eventually all of them will switch because the benefits of being vendor neutral are major.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 26, 2008 8:20 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

You might not have noticed, but IBM's position on Linux changed somewhat in the last years. Now it's just a AIX for the poor, with a lower functionality, performance, features etc, but free. Go speak with their sales.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 26, 2008 13:49 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Maybe I am naïve, but I presume sales will always say dumb things that are half truths and there is no avoiding it. Do you know if this view is reflected by actions taken by other departments/groups?

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 26, 2008 22:41 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

By other groups, do you mean engineering? No idea, I don't have any contact with these. What I do see is a shift from _sales_ trying to make clients migrate from AIX to Linux to _sales_ saying "actually, AIX is better".

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 27, 2008 2:32 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I meant engineering, professional services, product management, corporate officers.. anything!

Basically I view sales as completely unreliable.

If I were IBM's strategic planners, I would invest significantly in Linux but continue to charge a premium for AIX, which might result in sales saying AIX is better -- but this is just a theory, I don't know anything.

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? (New York Times)

Posted Sep 26, 2008 11:10 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

In my mind Sun has the image of a company that sells propritary versions of free softwares. StartOffice, Solaris, MySQL, VirtualBox.

According to my very limited understanding, this is not exactly a sustainable model of operation in the long run. If so, what is thedir motivation to develop free software?