Alan Hargreaves' Weblog
The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC* Principal Field Technologist
* Solaris and Network Domain Technology Support Centre - The group I work forTags
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Friday Dec 31, 2004
Enterprise Unix Roundup: 2004, the Year of the Ferment
Michael Hall has written up his Enterprise Unix Roundup for 2004 at Serverwatch.
I've been reading prior articles from Michael, and it's nice to see that it looks like he is coming to the belief that we are not to be written off yet. In fact the title for the portion on Sun is "Sun: Not Dead, Maybe Even Renewing Itself".
He's also become far less skeptical about the Open Sourcing of Solaris, although there still appears to be the feeling that we are going to "... keep firm control over the OS". Being involved in the pilot and seeing the direction in which we are going convinces me otherwise, but I guess we'll just have to let the community and the press draw their own conclusions once the license is announced and the Open Sourcing formally launched.
I think that the final paragraph is worth quoting.
In the end, although Sun's two most positive actions this year were its push to stress the technical merits of Solaris (with an attendant promise to focus on its neglected Solaris x86), and its partnership with AMD to x86 hardware to market. The former means Unix on the whole will continue to move forward, and the latter represents good timing on Sun's part, as Intel's Itanium founders in the face of AMD's Opteron assault.
Posted at 08:56AM Dec 31, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris | Comments[7]
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Will we ever see a mea culpa out of the folks in the press if/when the facts prove otherwise?
Posted by John Clingan on December 31, 2004 at 03:24 PM EST #
Well I've seen a few folks in various places who have committed to reserving judgement and eating crow if it is appropriate. Like you said, we'll have to see.
Posted by Alan Hargreaves on December 31, 2004 at 03:28 PM EST #
Posted by c0t0d0s0.org on December 31, 2004 at 05:48 PM EST #
People ask me this all the time, and how I explain it is that Sun will continue to sell a fully supported and branded Solaris product. That doesn't change. We control that. However, we will now be doing our development in the open and taking a variety of contributions from the Solaris community, which, of course, will be fully enfranchised with an OSI-approved license. In other words, we are building a genuine open source community that Sun leads, contributes to, and bases its product on. The community will generate innovations that will lead to the enhancement Sun's Solaris product as well as the creation of other products and services based on OpenSolaris that various community members or companies will drive and profit from.
Most people in the press are not making the distinction between <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">product</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">community</span> at this time. They will, though.
Jim
Posted by Jim on December 31, 2004 at 07:03 PM EST #
Posted by iwan ang on December 31, 2004 at 10:35 PM EST #
Posted by c0t0d0s0.org on January 07, 2005 at 11:12 PM EST #
Will we ever see a mea culpa out of the folks in the press if/when the facts prove otherwise?
I try to make it a point to go back when I'm proven wrong and admit it, so although I'm not sure what it is I stand to be "proven wrong" about, if one of you cares to write and say "You were wrong and here are the reasons" I'll certainly give it a hard look.
I'm ok with people saying we're going to control the operating system as long as they make the very important distinction that it's Sun's Solaris product we are controlling, not the community or the community's ability to innovate and contribute.
Well, I'll already express regret that I haven't worked hard enough to make that distinction. And I'd be happy to get some pointers on where I can see that community dynamic in action once it's up to speed.
I wonder what makes him think that HP-UX and AIX are dead.
I didn't say they're dead, and I don't think it's "the open source movement" that's of interest.
I said that Sun is the company most aggressively pushing back on Linux. HP and IBM are not. So in terms of perceived market momentum, Linux has it and Sun's clearly trying to arrest that, and that's where the "Linux vs. Proprietary Unix" story is at. The others are looking for something like peaceful coexistence. Sun seems to be placing less emphasis on the peaceful part, and much more interested in some of what HP & IBM have pretty much ceded to Linux down in the x86 market. Maybe I'm wrong with that impression, but please don't put words in my mouth.
Posted by Michael Hall on January 18, 2005 at 05:48 AM EST #