Peregrinations

The land where time stands still

Wednesday Mar 14, 2007



I had to doublecheck the date on this article again. Former Sun employee Adrian Keward has been busy laying into, er, Sun. According to Techworld, Mr Keward "knows where the bodies are buried -- and he's been showing us around the graveyard."

I took against this piece for two reasons. Firstly, when did this use of double hyphens come in? I see it all the time -- these days. What's the purpose of this redundant punctuation? Anyone know?

Secondly, I think that any independent observer would say that there has been a sea-change at Sun, in Solaris, in open source and in hardware, over the last three years. Mr Keward's perception of Sun's failings circa 2004 is hardly news. (Incidentally, Mr Keward appeared in the first season of LugRadio, while still at Sun. Respect. You can hear him here.)

Quickly, or as quickly as possible, let's rehash his arguments. He was responding to my colleague, (and I should say friend and fellow Liverpudlian), Jim Craig who made the point that Solaris is being adopted on the x86 platform and that sometimes, people buying what they think is a substitutable Linux distro on a white box are not realising all the benefits they expected. (Red Hat on Itanium, anybody?). This, of course, gets reported as "trashing Linux".

Anyway, Mr Keward's less than cogent argument is says that Sun's focus is hardware and that software is entirely subservient to this, that OpenSolaris is an act of desperation, that Sun is pushing a proprietary platform and that support outside US is not good enough ("there's only two people in the Europe").

He goes on to say that Sun has lost $5bn and is "propped up" by "Microsoft patent money" (not the first time I've seen a Novell employee try to confuse their own controversial deal which rather circumvents the spirit of the GPL with Sun's out of court settlement for antitrust and patent issues).

Well, my goodness me. Do you think that George Bush will get reelected? I wonder what effect the expansion of the EU will have. Looking forward to the Athens Olympics?

Sorry for the whithering sarcasm, but this is laughable and I'm astonished that it's reported without moderation. Mr Keward is apparently out of touch with Sun's x86 and x64 hardware lines, the GPLing of the T1, Sun's great investment in Solaris prior and subsequent to OpenSolaris, Sun's leading position in eco-responsible hardware, the hundreds of sustaining engineers that Sun employes across Europe. And the $5bn? Clearly, he's overlooking Sun's recent acqusitions, including Storagetek ($4.1bn).

But it was the end of the article really raised my eyebrows. Mr Keward describes Sun's approach to open source as "opportunistic" and expresses a hope that Sun will "do the right thing", but sadly, "the market's moved on."

How, I wonder, does he explain 4 consecutive quarters of market share growth and a return to profitability? And, (even) closer to my heart, how can he describe Sun's enormous contribution to Free software as "opportunistic"? And lastly, what should Sun learn from Novell in order to be "doing the right thing"? I'm all ears.


ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer

[6] Comments
Like this post? del.icio.us | furl | slashdot | technorati | digg
Posted at 11:26AM Mar 14, 2007 by Patrick Finch in OpenSource
Tags:
Comments:

The double-hyphen is perhaps an attempt to represent an em-dash instead of en-dash. At least, that's what I use them for (in ASCII correspondence).

Posted by Luke Howard on March 14, 2007 at 12:03 PM GMT-01:00 #

TeX (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) has long used double hyphens for en-dashes and triple hyphens for em-dashes.

Posted by D.N. Bernardo on March 14, 2007 at 01:35 PM GMT-01:00 #

The double hyphen as a representation of the em-dash is long standing. The use of the em-dash is even longer standing. So, it might just be coincidental that you have noticed it more recently. But usage is often affected by fashion, so perhaps it is being used more.

I think that Mr. Keward's remarks about support of Solaris and Webserver is totally out of line, even three years ago. Solaris support is totally "follow-the-sun" and has been for a very long time. Some products have fewer specialists and as such support may be better at some times than others, but even there, a specialist for a product is as likely to be in Europe or Asia as in America.

Posted by Brian Utterback on March 14, 2007 at 02:17 PM GMT-01:00 #

What is parhaps saddest of all, is that if Novell wanted to differentiate itself from Red Hat in an entirely positive way, it would switch from Linux to Solaris as the basis for its product base. They've probably dug too deep in terms of rhetoric to do so, now, but I believe it would have been a good fit given their existing dwindling NetWare base, and wiould put clear water technically between themselves and Red Hat.

Posted by James Mansion on March 15, 2007 at 12:39 PM GMT-01:00 #

The double hyphen indicates that the author is grinning (what Lee & Herring defined as a 'cornish grin') and giving the reader a nod, to express cheekily-suppressed mirth and merriment.

Posted by jimi on March 15, 2007 at 02:47 PM GMT-01:00 #

I'm also rather amused at the hypocrisy of the whole thing. Novell bought SUSE and then created openSUSE as a vehicle to peddle it's other services in their own act of "desperation." There are two phrases that come to mind here: Sour grapes and pot/kettle.

Posted by andrew on March 15, 2007 at 03:35 PM GMT-01:00 #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.