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Wednesday April 22, 2009 We had a town hall style event today and some Oracle brass were there to answer some questions.
What struck me most about the mood of the questions was the pride and ownership that Sun employees have over our products. Not only was there a paternal pride over the products we birthed, we had it for those that we adopted.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg, we wanted to know if our customers were going to be looked after. We have an emotional investment with them as well. I still have friends who buy Sun gear and I'm quick to answer their questions when they get stuck. I'm sure others do that as well.
I think that as long as a company's culture embraces that pride, their customers will get a product that they love. We've seen that to date with Sun and OpenSolaris - Sun employees want the quality poured into Solaris to remain in OpenSolaris. That is probably the biggest differentiator between Linux and OpenSolaris. And if you don't understand that pride and investment, you'll never accept OpenSolaris as open source.
But if you do understand how individuals at Sun own quality, then you'll understand how our products and customers are going to be looked after.
I know some of this 'individuals' personally. I believe they (and may others whom I don't know) are the part of the value which SUN has as a company - people who cares what a customer gets. I hope this culture will stay with the new management as well.
Posted by Tigran Mkrtchyan on April 23, 2009 at 09:52 AM CDT #
"We've seen that to date with Sun and OpenSolaris - Sun employees want the quality poured into Solaris to remain in OpenSolaris. That is probably the biggest differentiator between Linux and OpenSolaris. And if you don't understand that pride and investment, you'll never accept OpenSolaris as open source."
Sorry to have to write this, but "OpenSolaris" the distribution is an abomination.
All we really needed was regular "latest and greatest" FOSS software in Solaris 10, when it boils down to it at the end of the day. And System V packaging could have been incrementally improved to the point where it clearly trumped competition.
That is all. And this, this - abomination that is going to kill JumpStart(TM), kill Flash(TM), kill the output of uname(1), IPS - "a no scripting zone" - this thing that is supposed to be "Solaris.Next" and uses GNU as the default, it's horrible.
If that's not enough to kill off the long time Solaris user base like myself, then I don't know what is.
I can't accept something I fundamentally don't agree with - I'm all for open source, but I'm very much against "GNUifiying" and "RedHatting" of Solaris!
If I wanted GNU, if I wanted RedHat - I would already be there. I would not be on System V, I would not be on Solaris, I would not be on HP-UX.
Posted by UX-admin on May 02, 2009 at 06:23 AM CDT #
In my opinion, there should not be a distribution of OpenSolaris called OpenSolaris. One of the main reasons is that you are talking about "OpenSolaris" the distribution and I am talking about OpenSolaris the operating system. To be fair, you point that out in your reply.
I don't deal very much with OpenSolaris the distribution - I deal exclusively with the release called Nevada. And in that distribution, things work just the same as before.
But to be honest here as well, I never ran Solaris 10 in production, I skipped from Solaris 8 straight to Nevada. And I never had to deal with patches. So for me, the sum total of my interaction with packaging was at install time.
Finally, some food for thought, I think that when the new packaging system takes off, you will soon see a lot more distributions out there. While I have mixed emotions about that, I think it will allow OpenSolaris to become more widely accepted.
Posted by Thomas Haynes on May 03, 2009 at 11:47 AM CDT #