Bill Moffitt's Weblog

Thursday March 03, 2005

Finally, it's out... Well, it has been a long time since I have been able to make an entry - a lot of long days and nights lately getting all the miscellaneous loose ends pulled together so Solaris 10 could make its triumphant entrance. Between the changes in the product itself and the rapidly-shifting business model, it was not a trivial task to get all the ancillary pieces (web presence, download site, registration, field training, OEM program, etc.) together and moving at once.

But the result is worth it - seeing the press coverage (a recent example), the comments in blogs, slashdot (I liked this one; starts out with a stupid troll and ends up with some good points before disappearing into stupidness again), and, most importantly, the nearly million registered systems already is extraordinarily gratifying.

My job, of course, isn't building the product - that's the job of the real geniuses in the next building, from the big technical brains to the organizational folks like Meggie Chen who actually drive the process of turning a bunch of code into a working OS. My job is to do all the work around the product to make sure that people know about it, understand why it's worthwhile evaluating, and can get it as easily as possible.

So I am very happy that Solaris 10 has come roaring out of the gate - it's a great technical achievment, and I am glad to have been a part of making it as successful as it is.

While there's a lot left to do, I think that the release of Solaris 10 and the imminent arrival of OpenSolaris has Solaris very well-positioned for the future. I won't speculate on the future of Solaris vis-a-vis Linux (I run 'em both and I like 'em both), but I think it's time for me to do something different.

Stay tuned.
(2005-03-03 08:25:23.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday August 05, 2004

Proprietary comments...
Copyright 2004, all rights reserved, etc.

No, no, that's not what I meant by "proprietary comments." :-)

Someone objected to my identifying Red Hat Enterprise Linux as proprietary; the logic (as I understand it) being that it cannot be proprietary because one can get the source code and hack it any way one wishes.

While that's a wonderful attribute of RHEL, that doesn't keep it from being proprietary - proprietary means, simply, that someone claims ownership rights to it. While you can get the source code for all the things that comprise RHEL, and you can compile them, put them together, and even build a bit-for-bit replica of RHEL, it's not RHEL because only Red Hat owns and can grant you the rights to use the real RHEL. You may have the software, but you don't acquire the rights that Red Hat sells as part of RHEL; indeed, changing the code at all can cause you to lose rights to support.

My very good friend Larry Wake is much more articulate than I about this; those inside of Sun can easily see his thoughts on this at his Proprietary Propriety website (sorry that link doesn't work unless you're inside the Sun network), but the essence of it is that some of our competitors have chosen to describe our products as "proprietary" and then corrupt the meaning so it looks like it means "closed." Of course, just about anything that is sold is "proprietary," otherwise it wouldn't have much value. The fact that you can get all the source code for RHEL for free doesn't make it any less proprietary, and it only makes it marginally less open than Solaris. It just means the source code is freely available.

The real and important difference and distinction between operating systems is really open vs. closed. Open means it's built on open standards, and that you can move easily between different proprietary implementations of those open standards. Linux (all the distributions) and Solaris are open, and it's very easy, for instance, to move code that was built for one to run on the other. Open also means that the interfaces are freely available, so innovation can happen in the implementation of those interfaces or in what is done on top of those interfaces.

Windows, z/OS, and OS/400 are not only proprietary, they're closed. That means that code written to run on one of those operating systems cannot easily be moved to another OS because all (or nearly all) the interfaces are proprietary and cannot be replicated in other OSs. It's very difficult and expensive, in general, to move a Windows program to UNIX or Linux because so many interface calls need to be changed (or sections of the code re-architected), and the only opportunity for innovation is on top of those interfaces, not underneath them.

So Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Solaris, and Windows, are all proprietary, and that's a good thing because that's how the respective companies can sell and support those products.

The important distinction to be made is not proprietary vs. non-proprietary; it's open vs. closed. Open means easy to switch, high innovation, and competition based on quality of implementation, not "lock-in." Linux and Solaris are open, Windows is closed.
(2004-08-05 10:54:42.0) Permalink

Wednesday August 04, 2004

Expensive and Proprietary UNIX in the Orwellian world Another LinuxWorld is here, and so we are once again beseiged with all the stories of the poor, oppressed IT managers who find freedom and higher budgets by replacing their old, proprietary, expensive UNIX gear (usually Sun, since we have, by far, the most UNIX gear installed worldwide) with cheap, open x86 gear running Linux. Now, finally, their lives will be perfect: no longer held captive by a single, rapacious vendor; they'll be able to do so much more with so much less that eventually they'll be able to run entire enterprises with a rack of blade servers, sleep in until 10, and spend their budgets on conferences held in Tahiti.

The problem is, of course, that the sources of these stories are increasingly suspect; when Michael Dell is telling you that the "UNIX mainframe" is dead (what the hell is a "UNIX mainframe," anyway??) you have to wonder if he just might have an axe to grind... especially since his company has decided to cancel all their servers with more than 4 CPUs...

I used to do a lot of work as a Sun spokesperson, and I was called one time to comment on one of these stories. The reporter had a real scoop: a company that was replacing this $100,000 Sun machine with a $3,000 x86-Linux server. The truth is that their business had declined, and the Sun E3000 (a 6-way UltraSPARC II machine with multiple power supplies & other high-end RAS features) they had been running for five years was overkill. They could have easily replaced it with the new SunFire V210 server for about the same price and they wouldn't have even had to buy new software or retrain their sysadmins.

I know that was a surprise to the reporter; I suspect it came as a surprise to the customer, as well, who was told by someone that Sun machines are too expensive. And, hey, the x86/Linux vendor's rep seemed to know what he was doing...

But that's the nature of the Big Lie: tell it enough times and folks accept it as the truth. Solaris is expensive (it starts at $99, and you can use it for free for development or evaluation), it's proprietary (just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and it's tied to expensive, proprietary Sun hardware (Solaris has run on x86 architectures for over 10 years, and SPARC is the only major architecture based on open standards - check www.sparc.org).

I understand that it's easy to dismiss me as a Sun Solaris apologist, but I should point out that I'm writing this on my Sony Pentium III laptop running (yep, you guessed it) Linux. My real concern is about the right tool for the job: Linux has some real advantages, particularly in having a community to keep up with all the perturbations in the x86 platform world (new machines, peripherals, drivers, etc.). But when it comes to the servers that run your business, the ones that are absolutely mission-critical, technology matters - you want to have every advantage you can, and that's why we're still pouring R&D into Solaris, even though Michael Dell says it's foolish.

Ah, well... at least it's a good time to start rumors. I gotta go... some folks are taking up a collection to go buy Novell. I'll give 'em twenty bucks.
(2004-08-04 10:48:35.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday July 28, 2004

And the coolest thing in Solaris 10 is... DTrace, in my opinion. Admittedly, there are about 100 people in the world who will be able to really put it to great use, but they can save scripts and share their brilliance with all of us lesser mortals. All the other stuff is great: Predictive Self-Healing ("FMA" and "Greenline"), N1 Grid Containers (Zones), the file system that dare not have a name ("ZFS"), etc. They're really important features that help our customers get a lot more out of their hardware. But DTrace is just plain cool. (2004-07-28 15:21:14.0) Permalink Comments [1]