Screw Sun [LWN.net]

Screw Sun

Posted Jul 31, 2003 16:42 UTC (Thu) by JohnBell (guest, #12625)
In reply to: Screw Sun by fx
Parent article: Sun Sees Road To Prosperity Paved With Its Own Products (TechWeb)

This thread is hilarious. Now we're waving our BMWs (running WinCE, of all things) and aerobic intstructor girlfriends around to prove our arguments. We might as well throw Hitler into the mix and call it a day.

Obviously I have hit a sore spot, those damn Altix machines, how -dare- SGI make such a box? The audacity! The temerity! Why, it's gotten to the point where a fat cat Sun consultant can't fleece his customers for everything they have! Yes, my Sun brothers, these are dark days indeed... the evil Big Blue mainframes are beating us, Linux is beating us, SGI is beating us, Unilever is throwing us out the door and going all Linux, the Linux cluster manufacturers are getting all the scientific and Hollywood projects. Oh, how terrible! I may have to trade down to a Buick and start dating Flo down at the Waffle House!

LOL

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Screw Sun

Posted Jul 31, 2003 17:28 UTC (Thu) by fx (guest, #12077) [Link]

I didn't start talking about cars, somebody else did that.
I'm not saying SGI should stop building the Altix, it's an interesting excercise. I'm just saying that it doesn't scale up to the levels a SUN Fire 15K can for real world workloads. I don't agree with SUN being "just another failing proprietary UNIX company" either.
If you're honestly thinking SGI is beating SUN I think you've been on Mars the past 10 years, so I can't wait to hear the stories.
I'm not just a SUN consultant. As I said in another comment, I've been doing Linux since 1994 and passed the RHCE exam. I've worked for several Linux companies, both as an employee and an independent consultant. I've even been reselling some Red Hat support contracts.
And it's true: there is very little money in Linux. Ask that to any Linux company struggling to survive (BTW, anybody remember what happened to VALinux ?). Companies do use Linux, but they do it mostly on low-end "edge" servers and in many cases they don't even bother to have a support contract. They consider it a "black box" OS.
Talking about waffles: how did you know I'm from Belgium?

Screw Sun

Posted Jul 31, 2003 17:59 UTC (Thu) by JohnBell (guest, #12625) [Link]

Mars was great, I highly recommend the skiing ;-).

Belgium, eh? Nice place. I enjoy Europe in general. I usually head for Germany (Bavaria) or Austria, however (family on my wife's side).

Just as another data point, I myself have made a killing working on Linux and Linux-based projects. I guess good work is where you find it. My current job is to wrangle a large Linux and FreeBSD farm, using things like Oracle 9i RAC on Linux, supporting multi-tier web apps, etc.

I do enjoy my job, very much, as I am sure you do yours. Let's not kid ourselves that there is no money to made in Linux, however. Especially supporting it. IBM has already proven that it can be done, and companies are scrambling madly for the technology. Linux is here to stay, and it's going to make a lot of people very well off.

Screw Sun

Posted Jul 31, 2003 18:38 UTC (Thu) by fx (guest, #12077) [Link]

The day Linux starts powering some real databases in the various datacenters in Brussels I'll be going back to Linux. For the moment, the HP-UX/Solaris market is just infinitely bigger here. Even a dead-end OS like Tru64 is generating more business. Sad but true.
The company I work for now is migrating some NT web servers to Linux, but that's peanuts to what they've got running on HP-UX.

Screw Sun

Posted Jul 31, 2003 18:33 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

It's not that a living can't be made by being a Linux specialist--it's just that certain assumptions have to be rethought (both on the specialist's end and their customers'.) The system of consultancy that works with proprietary software just doesn't work the same way with free software. It just takes some retooling of the process, and the market hasn't completely figured out how to exploit the new method yet.