Monday September 27, 2004 Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness
Monday September 27, 2004 The community, open source and Sun: An interesting bifurcation
Take a look at Eric Schrock's entry on Open Solaris.
Then note This article amongst many others.
I wonder why it is when it comes to open source and Unix, Solaris is seen as a threat by some in the community (which as Jonathan noted, is mostly because of this company), while Java is seen as something needed. It's all very odd-- unless you consider that people have motivations other than what they're stating...
Could it be that some people are just so emotionally invested in Linux that they can't even consider an alternative? Could it be that certain companies aren't really fighting for what they say they are, but instead just trying to tilt the playing field their direction?
In either case, either the argument from the Linux camp or the OS Java camp doesn't hold up, since both can't be true to what they believe and make their claims.
On a tangent, why is it pure evil, in some people's opinions, for Sun to target Red Hat, when Red Hat has built their business for the last few years targeting Sun. I agree with Jonathan; let's start calling a distro a distro.
( Sep 27 2004, 08:42:19 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]Post a Comment:
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Posted by R on September 28, 2004 at 01:13 AM PDT #
I very much agree.
Having said that, Sun's founded upon competing on implementation, not on control of the specification. Toward that end, the sales orgs will always be coming up against each other-- that's the nature of the game. Customers win over the Microsoft model only *when* that happens.
I'd rather we all say, first choose Unix (and Java). Then choose open standards. Then make your evaluation against the open standards and what you're trying to do. Lately the battle has been over what constitutes an open standard.
For some people, anything that isn't "Linux" isn't an open standard. For others it must be open source. For other still, it must be an ISO or ECMA standard.
The problem with most of these mentioned above is that they don't do anything about making sure things work together. One only needs look at ANSI C++ to see where things can go wrong. Things like POSIX and LSB specify how things *should* work, but without any enforcement, other than market acceptance (which allows the RH model of getting ISVs on their platform and making it hard to hit the other platforms).
If you want to stop the bickering, then don't incite it and tell your vendors you want them to meet your needs and meet the standards. Unfortunately, what I sometimes see from customers is emotional decisions, justified by feature battles. Customers egg this on by saying "Sun's going out of business" or "but you don't have feature xyz that I'm not using, but might like to someday".
Posted by Matt Ingenthron on September 28, 2004 at 12:01 PM PDT #