[advocacy-discuss] Any responses to this Infoworld Article ?

[Simon Phipps]

On Sep 28, 2008, at 12:00, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> And you should know that most of the claims in this article are  
> unfortunately
> true.

Really, Jörg?  Let's see:

> Solaris, he said, has almost no new deployments

Untrue. I am aware of a steady stream. I'll leave it to Dan and  
Charlie to illustrate though.

> and is a legacy operating environment

Well, "legacy" is a weasel-word. Since Linux is now 10 years into mass  
deployment it too gets described as "legacy" by those with an axe to  
grind. People selling Windows Vista, for example.

> offered by a company with financial difficulties.

That was true in 2003, for sure. While the stock is down, to be sure,  
but the numbers on the business look stable to me at the moment.

> Original equipment manufacturers also do not see a bright future for  
> Solaris, he claims.

That would be why HP, Dell and indeed IBM are all carrying it.

> By contrast, Linux is the overwhelming choice for new deployments on  
> x86 systems, Zemlin says.  Sun has had its strength in applications  
> such as ERP systems with a seven- to 20-year life cycle, he adds.  
> "What's starting to happen is those life cycles are starting to be  
> completed," and those customers are moving to Linux.

Like the curate's egg, that's true in parts. Equally I'm aware of  
contexts where it's not. This is as objective as the "legacy" statement.

> That move to Linux is accelerated by Linux's strength in Web  
> applications, where developers today are focused, Zemlin adds. "You  
> can't really talk to any Web-based application company these days  
> that's not using Linux," he says.

Really? I suspect we could come up with quite a few between us.  
Gracenote s actually mentioned later in the article, for example.

> Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims.

I'd love to see that sweeping statement sweepingly justified.

> "Customers are pretty aware that Unix is a more expensive legacy  
> architecture. They continue to support it because they don't want to  
> change their legacy apps over to a new platform because of the  
> costs," Zemlin said. "But they know now they eventually need to do  
> it because Unix just doesn't have the combined might of all the  
> different organizations and individuals that are developing [for]  
> Linux."

Zemlin is living in 2002.

> Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in  
> terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product  
> than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data  
> show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million  
> in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris  
> shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

IDC figures here are almost certainly correct, I agree. This is a  
strong motivation to make OpenSoalris excellent on x86 as well as on  
SPARC.

> Solaris, Zemlin says, is losing market share because it does not  
> have a good price performance or value proposition.

My word, this man loves sweeping statements. I do hope he has the  
sweeping proofs of all this, because I suspect that any system  
offering a good value proposition with Linux will offer an even better  
one with OpenSolaris. He seems stuck in 2002 again.

> Zemlin also disputes Sun's notion that Solaris technology gives it  
> an edge over Linux. "The only people I hear talk about DTrace  
> [Solaris's technology for assessing program and OS behaviours] and  
> ZFS [the Zettabyte File System] as competitive features [are] Sun  
> Microsystems sales representatives. It's not something I believe is  
> impacting the market in any way," he says.

That would be why NetApp was worried enough to start a lawsuit, why  
ZFS for FUSE just reached v0.5 and why the Linux Foundation is  
sponsoring work on SystemTap.

> That Solaris has some superior features is not really in question;

Well, apart from by Jim Zemlin who is incapable of giving credit where  
it is due.

> Sun's OS has received numerous accolades, including InfoWorld's  
> Technology of the Year award. But with capabilities such as ZFS and  
> DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, Zemlin says.

Minor features, like a revolutionary file system, a revolutionary  
observability tool and a revolutionary management facility, just to  
name three.

> "That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building  
> as it burns to the ground." And the Linux community is working on  
> rival technology, Zemlin adds.

So, let's get this straight, none of the revolutionary features in  
OpenSolaris matter one jot, but the Linux community is nonetheless  
wasting time trying to clone them?

> Given Sun's own Linux support on its Sparc and x86 servers, Zemlin  
> suggests that it should make ZFS and DTrace available under a Linux- 
> compatible license. Sun instead uses its Common Development and  
> Distribution License (CDDL), which is not compatible with the Linux  
> GNU General Public License. (Sun says CDDL provides licensing  
> support for a greater universe of systems than GPL does.)

Ah, OK, so ZFS and DTrace are "minor features" that are "not something  
I believe is impacting the market in any way" and yet Zemlin wishes  
they were easily available to him to use?

> A key reason is that more people are available to support Linux than  
> Solaris, says Noah Broadwater, vice president of information  
> services at Sesame Workshop. "I honestly have one person who is  
> certified on Solaris. I have four people who are certified on  
> Linux," Broadwater said.

Yep, I agree with this one, needs work. I think it's in-hand but that  
would be up to the Sun marketing folk to confirm.

> The other key issue with Solaris boils down to one word: cost.  
> Sesame is saving about $20,000 a year in support costs by moving to  
> Linux, Broadwater says.

Is this a fair comparison? They moved off Solaris classic on old SPARC  
hardware? These sorts of examples usually have that as the story. They  
may have saved even more if they had moved to OpenSolaris on commodity  
hardware.

> The Linux Foundation's Zemlin, though, dismisses Sun's open-source  
> Solaris as "too little, too late." His foundation has also charged  
> that there is no real open source community around OpenSolaris,

This is philosophically very hard stuff here that doesn't benefit from  
the sort of irresponsible sound bite Zemlin is using. There is no open  
source community around RHEL either - in fact I'd posit that  
OpenSolaris 2008.11 has a stronger community than RHEL. Yet it is  
based on solid open source community work just as OpenSolaris is, both  
in Fedora and in the component communities like GNOME, Mozilla, X and  
many more.

> arguing that Sun still controls development.

I'd agree that Sun employees all the key developers on the "kernel",  
yes, and that's a key difference from the Linux kernel.  I assume this  
is the item you are actually referring to, Jörg?

> To back up its point, the foundation points to blogs detailing  
> disputes over control of OpenSolaris and the Sun-driven OpenDS  
> directory projects, from February 2008 and November 2007. Sun  
> declined to comment on the specifics of these issues and noted they  
> both happened several months ago.

& I'm not interested in digging up those old skeletons either, beyond  
noting that citing Roy's gesture like that ignores a whole lot of  
community reality and OpenDS is unrelated to OpenSolaris and had its  
own very special context.

> Zemlin claims Open Solaris is no more than an attempt to expand the  
> Solaris user base to drive customers to commercial Sun technology.

Absolute, unalloyed rubbish that Zemlin should be ashamed of,  
especially as he is so proud of HP and IBM who actually /do/ have that  
as their strategy around HP-UX and AIX.


So, "most of the claims" are true, Jörg?

S.