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OSCON: Sun, Yahoo, Google -- and maybe you (NewsForge)

[Posted August 4, 2005 by cook]

NewsForge presents coverage of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "After two days of tutorials, O'Reilly's OSCON Open Source Convention began in earnest yesterday by highlighting some unusual approaches to open source software development and use, including Sun's contention that OpenSolaris should be compared to Linux less on ideology and more on a technical basis. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz asserted that his company's recently opened operating system was bringing more competition and choice to the community and that beyond ideological differences, was comparable to Linux. "Let's compare them," he said. "It's no longer about competing with a social movement. Let's get the politics out of the way we talk about competition.""
to post comments

I credit Filo

Posted Aug 5, 2005 2:49 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

Yahoo's David Filo is one of the real pioneers here. He was implementing FreeBSD farms, backing them up with code written in perl, compiled with gcc, running Apache etc back when it really was considered absurd to try to build a real corporation with open source. Back when it was generally understood that "server" meant Sun or DEC. This was years before Google. Hats off to you Filo, the original "cheap" pioneer.

Linux vs solaris

Posted Aug 5, 2005 11:48 UTC (Fri) by remijnj (guest, #5838) [Link]

Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz asserted that his company's recently opened operating system was bringing more competition and choice to the community and that beyond ideological differences, was comparable to Linux. "Let's compare them," he said. "It's no longer about competing with a social movement. Let's get the politics out of the way we talk about competition.""

If people keep mentioning the ideological differences maybe that just means that they find this important. Maybe Sun should just listen to the developers who they want in their "community". If they would start listening and acting upon it they would get the community and the respect they want.

Ofcourse we should also compare Linux and solaris on technical grounds but if people don't want to (or can't) use the product on ideological grounds then it doesn't make sense to start comparing.

OSCON: Sun, Yahoo, Google -- and maybe you (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 5, 2005 12:43 UTC (Fri) by martin (guest, #434) [Link] (1 responses)

"It's no longer about competing with a social movement. Let's get the politics out of the way we talk about competition."

Unfortunately for him it's impossible to do this. I've used Solaris successfully on many telco projects and have a fair amount of respect technically (at least for the Sparc version of it) for it I'm not really able to extend the same respect to the whole company he runs.

They've gone through absurd schizoid flip flops of policy on Linux and X86 Solaris support. At one point I had Sun sales people in my office telling me they were all behind Linux and they'd love to sell it to us, next week different story. We got burned on the Solaris 7 X86 thing as well.

Largely thanks to management bungling, they've managed to acquire a repuation of being both fickle and pretend friends to the open source community. This may actually be somewhat undeserved but they have only themselves to blame for it and the answer lies in them addressing their own behaviour, not expecting the rest of the world to change theirs.

And as he's so concerned about being competitive, he may wish to ask himself why Sun want more money for the empty racks than you can get a complete and more powerful Linux / BSD production system for.

Martin

OSCON: Sun, Yahoo, Google -- and maybe you (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 11, 2005 6:35 UTC (Thu) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link]

Social movement is still important... until the community at large begins
to trust Sun (much of it doesn't), the growth rate of OpenSolaris is
going to be limited.

The company I work with also does telco apps on Sun hardware, though
we're moving our major Tier 1 customer onto IBM Bladecenters running
Linux at a healthy rate.

OSCON: Sun, Yahoo, Google -- and maybe you (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 5, 2005 12:47 UTC (Fri) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]

"Let's get the politics out of the way we talk about competition."

Because we all know that there is no real competition in the political realm.

all the best,

drew

Translation: "We Can't Compete"

Posted Aug 5, 2005 14:31 UTC (Fri) by mkc (guest, #2047) [Link]

"...and everyone's tired of hearing about this whole 'cost' thing, too, so while we're at it, let's move beyond financial concerns..."


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