Reacting to claims by Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz that Red Hat is a proprietary incarnation of Linux, Red Hat’s vice president of open source affairs Michael Tiemann believes Schwartz should get his facts straight and expressed doubts over how open any open source Solaris is likely to be.
Red Hat tells Sun’s Schwartz to get a dictionary
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I agree with Red Hat here. Whatever people do say about them, they do “walk the walk” as far as keeping everything open source. (Hence the existence of RHEL clones). Sun has to be prepared to let go control of Solaris if they want it to survive and compete against the Linux juggernaut in the long time.
My hunch is that Sun wants something closer to Darwin/OS X than they want a truly open source OS that is free as in speech.
My hunch is that Sun wants something closer to Darwin/OS X than they want a truly open source OS that is free as in speech.
And that is bad because?
I mean, that model is working out extremely well for Apple, so I would find it more than logical for Sun to try to follow this idea.
And that is bad because?
It is failing to recognize that open source (in the free as in speech sense) really is the future as far as operating system software is concerned.
This will eventually come back to bite Apple too, mark my words.
The pace of development and innovation of truly free communities and projects will continue to skyrocket, and will result in products that will eventually be far superior in quality and features.
In other words, without the OSS community behind you in a big way, you simply will not be able to keep up indefinitely. Thus, Solaris will just continue to decline ever so slowly into extinction.
Actually it’s a good idea for Sun, but that would make sun less open than redhat. The pot calls the kettle black, again.
It is failing to recognize that open source (in the free as in speech sense) really is the future as far as operating system software is concerned.
You ARE being serious, right? You do realize that ever since the PC came up, all has been dominate by closed-source operating systems? You do realize that it took the biggest OSS operating system, desktoplinux, 13 years to gain a 3% marketshae? You do realize it took OSX only 5 years to surpass desktopinux in basically every aspect?
This will eventually come back to bite Apple too, mark my words.
I won’t waste my marker ink on that statement.
The pace of development and innovation of truly free communities and projects will continue to skyrocket, and will result in products that will eventually be far superior in quality and features.
Sure.
In other words, without the OSS community behind you in a big way, you simply will not be able to keep up indefinitely. Thus, Solaris will just continue to decline ever so slowly into extinction.
Wow. and I thought you actually made sense in your first post.
You ARE being serious, right? You do realize that ever since the PC came up, all has been dominate by closed-source operating systems? You do realize that it took the biggest OSS operating system, desktoplinux, 13 years to gain a 3% marketshae? You do realize it took OSX only 5 years to surpass desktopinux in basically every aspect?
I believe in the free software model. I am not alone. Poke fun if you want, but I think it makes perfect sense that in the long run, communities that share information openly and collaborate will perform better than closed communities that hoard information and try to divide and infringe on the rights of their users.
Sun is welcome to do whatever they want. Their OS, their business. However, they are making a play for mindshare using dubious amounts of wordplay. Sometimes “open” does not mean “Open” – no matter how much they want you to believe it does.
You do realize that 3/4 of what makes OS X thick in open source, right?
“You do realize that ever since the PC came up, all has been dominate by closed-source operating systems?”
You think this is based solely on merit? You think Windows has it’s dominance because it’s the best? Open source got off to a late start in the consumer market, but the more corporations pour money and time into it, the more continues to grow. Linux has approx the same marketshare as the the Mac already, and if Windows continues to be a problem, who knows what the future holds. You hate Linux, and that’s fine, Thom. But don’t that let bias completely cloud your judgement. Oh, and just in case you needed reminding (and I know you don’t), OS X wouldn’t be what it is if it were not for Open Source. Apple admits it, why can’t you?
Isn’t a little presumptuous to say what Sun will and will not do? While it might not be GPL, they have already stated publicly (via blogs and BoFs) that it will be OSI-approved, allow forking, and be designed to move the development of Solaris “over the wall.” Tiemann doesn’t understand this because he doesn’t read blogs and doesn’t attend conferences – he’s just spreading FuD based on personal speculation.
It’s one thing to speculate on the pros and cons of one license over another. It’s quite another to make broad accusations based on a license that has yet to be released, especially when the bits of information that _have_ been publicly leaked are in direct opposition. Open Sourcing a 10-million line OS with 20 years of development (and proprietary influences) and 500 engineers behind it doesn’t happen overnight.
“Isn’t a little presumptuous to say what Sun will and will not do?”
its better than lying that redhat is proprietary
Why is Sun speaking rubbish. What is their intent? When Microsoft speaks they generally make themselves sound good in most peoples eyes and is done to be beneficial to themselves. But as for Sun, what is going on? Schwartz seems to be doing a Laura DiDio.
Everyone know that Sun is speaking rubbish, and where I work – a large customet of Sun, are starting to worry about their cluelessness and garbage spouting.
Linux oringally meant the kernel. This is free (open sourse), free (freedom / liberty (GNU GPL)) and free (costless).
“Linux” now implies a distro including many applications. The distros are usually under more free, free and free licences, – GNU GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/ ) amongst many others.
Red Hat, as also Suse (Novel), IBM, and many many individuals and tiny companies all over the world make money from providing or supporting this software, and of course software needs hardware and infrastructure, so therefore also supporting as much as they can make money on. The GPL was intended for this.
So what was Sun’s Schwartz talking about?
MT – OK, what is it you guys want?
JS – We want a share of the x86 server market, which you guys oWn.
MT – Well, there is enough space for two or more here. Why don’t you guys compete on features and cost/performance?
JS – Nah, we want it all, and we want your a$$ with that too.
MT – We have 70% of the x86 server market. You guys have 0.1%. Seems you guys are a little late to the game, no?
JS – First, I’ll blog you to death. Second, we’ll give away our latest product, and when enough users have it installed, we’ll charge them for bugfixes. And third, we’ll help spread FUD about IP in GNU/Linux. And that’s for starters.
MT – Sure. Just one piece of advice: JS, you should get off the weed, man. And get a better hairdresser, too.
“Declining to speculate too much on what Sun might or might not do with Solaris, Tiemann said the company is doing a “great job” with its work on the open source Gnome project.
“We would like to see Sun [uphold] Gnome as a best practice and when it holds up Java it should recognize that compared with Gnome,” he said.”
IMHO the best advice to SUN anybody could give. learn from your guys even. left hand talk to the right hand and do things coherently
its better than lying that redhat is proprietary
So it’s OK to spread FUD in defense of Linux? Tiemann starts by fighting Sun’s FUD about RedHat, which is perfectly fine. But then he comes back with more mudslinging of his own over OpenSolaris, for no good reason and based on personal speculation. Maybe I’m not cut out for the world of corporate politics, but I don’t think it’s our place to judge one bit of FUD as justified while another isn’t.
“Tiemann starts by fighting Sun’s FUD about RedHat, which is perfectly fine. But then he comes back with more mudslinging of his own over OpenSolaris”
he says the license is not available currently and there is speculation on what open solaris actually would be which is very much true.
moreover he compliments sun’s work on gnome and says thats the model to follow. thats much much better than what crap and lies jonathan comes up with…
Sun is degrading itself with such lies. who are they cheating.. let them fight with someone their own size. scumps
In theory, proprietary in the long run cannot compete against truely open like Linux.
Really ? What’s the theory ?
“It is failing to recognize that open source (in the free as in speech sense) really is the future as far as operating system software is concerned.
This will eventually come back to bite Apple too, mark my words.
The pace of development and innovation of truly free communities and projects will continue to skyrocket, and will result in products that will eventually be far superior in quality and features.
In other words, without the OSS community behind you in a big way, you simply will not be able to keep up indefinitely. Thus, Solaris will just continue to decline ever so slowly into extinction.”
Forgive my naiveness. I am all for OSS development on any platform be it x86 or PPC. In fact my personal weapon of choice is Mac OS which I have been using for the last fifteen years.
I am just wondering from a developer perspective. if anyone could enlighten me how do you make money out of OSS cos beyond the computer monitor is something called real life. Theres kids to raise, loans to settle, the same kind of situation most of us are facing. My reckoning, if there is money to be made, a company sooner or later would seize that opportunity. A good example is Apple, yes they do support OSS, but frankly what is their real aim? To make money from that development – bash me if I am wrong.
Same per se for all the others, Sun, Red Hat. Microsoft – if by freak of accident that their software code would/could work with ‘Nix code, wouldn’t they do the same?
As for our hardworking developer friends out there (my sincere admiration for you guys); if one of them has the business savyness of Jobs or Gates, wouldn’t they come up with some sort of company to market “The Good Idea”?
Seriously my friends, I dread the day when that happens.
Comments, anyone?
That Microsoft is the common enemy, all this innerfighting makes me sick – Sun is a decent open source citizen, they helped GNOME out a lot, and now Solaris is being licensed under and open source compatable license.
RedHat has excellent policy on working with the open source community and e-patents..
The main enemy is not other OSS companies (or those that try, like Sun and Novell) it’s the monopoly that is Windows.
You ARE being serious, right? You do realize that ever since the PC came up, all has been dominate by closed-source operating systems? You do realize that it took the biggest OSS operating system, desktoplinux, 13 years to gain a 3% marketshae? You do realize it took OSX only 5 years to surpass desktopinux in basically every aspect?
Let’s not forget that OS X is heavily based on open source software. Besides, GNU/Linux may have even more market share than OS X (depending on which surveys you follow). Which one is better is your own preference.
The fact that GNU/Linux is where it is proves something. There have been other Microsoft competitors (BeOS, the IE/Netscape wars). Microsoft pretty much killed them. But, so far, GNU/Linux is surviving, and growing. Mozilla/Firefox is surviving, and gaining ground. Apache is more than surviving, it’s powering most of the world’s web servers. Obviously, the open source development model can work–it is working.
“My hunch is that Sun wants something closer to Darwin/OS X than they want a truly open source OS that is free as in speech. ”
This is retarded. Atleast the Darwin license dosen’t require you to have everything open. It’s a political arguement and it’s disguisting. Red Hat puts horrible limits on what you can do with their “open source” OS. Basicly they packaged software together released some rpms and told you you can’t copy it and you must pay $900+ for some open source OS. stupid. go some crack red hat.
Let’s not be Stupid here Red Hat. DON’T. When someone starts bashing and saying totally stupid and insane comments about a very powerful company like sun that has been criticising you it would be very dumb to do so.
You may seem great among linux users but corporate users would start to think your an idiot if you keep it up. Ignoring it would make sun seem stupid, but no you had to bash them back. That is exactly what sun wants you to do and sun will prove their point.
Now red hat is bashing other licenses. I told you what sun wanted to do and so far everything I told you came true.
I mean damn this is like criticising BSD! BSD makes up a lot of linux and it’s completely upsetting to me. BSD has a license that lets you do whatever you want with it while GNU has restrictions (you must keep it open source). Weither someone likes that or not is up to the software developer–Not some guy who rants on about it.
People are even criticising sun’s blogs. I mean $h!t, we’re now talking about restricting free speech. what happend to the liberaterian movement in open source?
Can’t we just say it’s not about the COMPANY it’s about the SOFTWARE? Red Hat does NOT own linux they just use it to make money. Why argue over what companies naturally say to each other (competition!!!!) and argue over the technical merits over the OS and NOT what some execs (Schwartz is very good btw, he turned sun around back to profitability) and license politicans do and say.
Let’s get away from political license talk and corporate competitive bashing and lets talk about the technical side.
Companies like Novell believe strongly in software patents and will sue anyone infriging on their patents. If you think they are registering them to protect open source your dreaming.
Let me clarify on this:
When a person whom people believe is ‘nutish’ start so say crazy comments to red hat (actually its the CEO doing it too) it is best to shut up and make them feel stupid as you gain marketshare. Once Red hat starts to bash sun they will ultimately loose the arguement as they will seem defensive and dumb.
I believe that sun has contributed more to open source than red hat has ever done in their existance and they do nothing more than package other people’s works and make loads of money off of putting restrictions on it. This is fact.
“You do realize that 3/4 of what makes OS X thick in open source, right?”
Do you realize that 3/4 of what makes linux thick is a copy of proprietary programs (UNIX) and interface look and feel (XEROX,Apple, …) ?
**Basicly they packaged software together released some rpms and told you you can’t copy it and you must pay $900+ for some open source OS. stupid. go some crack red hat.
Everheard of recompiling the source rpms to produce clones like WBEL, CentOS et. al.?
**I mean $h!t, we’re now talking about restricting free speech.
Free speech is not equal to blatantly lying in public.
**Let’s get away from political license talk and corporate competitive bashing and lets talk about the technical side.
Hmmm… Schwartz was explaining about Solaris, but he can’t restrain himself from talking about Red Hat. tsk…
Freedom without responsibility is Anarchy.
I would like to tell red hat to get a life. FUD is just that FUD and who cares what FUD comes out of any companys mouth.
OK, some interesting comments again. I think Jonathan Schwartz
is a firm believer in the adage “There’s no such thing as bad
publicity.”. MT responding is probably part of the plan,
particularly if you judge him by his other recent public
commentaries.
Now, the facts are:
Sun believe Redhat is a company who are compteting with Sun
in some of their market area and have plans to compete with
Sun in other market areas as soon as they are able. Redhat
is not some paragon of worldly virtue it is a company with
shareholders out to make money. Sun believe that the
solutions that Redhat provide are proprietary, not because
it’s contents are, but because of application choice
(something that people here and on slashdot forget is the
first choice that an enterprise has to make). If you want
to run a supported Oracle configuration, for example, on
Linux you haven’t got many choices with who you got to. The
story is the same for a lot of other ISV’s. This is the
quintessential point of Sun’s argument (if you can cut
through the exec rhetoric). The majority of the market
want to run supported configurations top to bottom and this
does restrict your choice. Sun is one of the few vendors
that can give you top to bottom solutions (which gives
you substantial leverage if TCO is important).
Fundamentally, if you want a more realistic perspective,
read the engineers blogs at http://blogs.sun.com/roller
We believe that:
Solaris10 is technologically better than anything else out
there.
It is now cheaper to run (and NO, you DON’t have to pay for
patches, you pay for support which includes the ability
to log bugs. You can always get Sun engineers on usenet
to log bugs for you anyway)
Sun can offer a better value subscription service (support)
than it’s competitors.
Sun hardware development is heading in the right direction
(wait till you see the new opteron systems next year).
Sun has been saying it would Open Source Solaris since 2001 and we are still waiting.
As for Apple, no one calls the Mac OS Open Source. Apple gives back source because 90% of what is in the core of the OS is GPL or BSD software in the first place. (Granted they don’t have to give back BSD code but it is cool that they do)
Sun doesn’t even OWN all of Solaris (At least that is what SCO will be saying if the Kernel in Solaris goes open) That is why Red Hat and others feel that Solaris is going to be somewhere between Apple’s open Darwin and Microsofts shared source. Not open to the point that a company like White Box (Which makes a free version of Red Hat Enterprise) can take the source and put out a free or different version of Solaris without Sun’s help or permission.
Now my question is why is Red Hat growing and Sun not. Sun is losing market share while Red Hat and Novell are gaining market share.
Remember Sun is trying to do what Red Hat created (Giving away your software and selling service) Sun has Billions of dollars invested in R&D that will go out the window if they truly Open Source their OS.
These are business moves Sun is using to save it’s self. So we will see what the future holds. Sun has not made a profit in almost 2 years.
Jonathan Schwartz & Scott McNealy are both a couple of schizo Sun freaks, Sun definitely needs a house cleaning in the executive branch of their establishment…
Sun has been saying it would Open Source Solaris since 2001 and we are still waiting.
Sun only said that if you wre willing to have the source, they will give you the CD containing the sources of Solaris. In 2001, everybody was able to get Solaris sources for 75 $ (cost of CD plus shipment).
So yes, the source is available if not open.
“So yes, the source is available if not open.”
point is it is NOT open otherwise we would be pleased with Microsoft and shared source. Making it available is just avoiding the real deal
You do realize that 3/4 of what makes OS X thick in open source, right?
You do realise probably 95% of OS X’s *value* is derived from closed source, right ? You think customers buy Macs because of Darwin and gcc, or because of Aqua, Cocoa and applications like FCP and Office ?
“You do realise probably 95% of OS X’s *value* is derived from closed source, right ? You think customers buy Macs because of Darwin and gcc, or because of Aqua, Cocoa and applications like FCP and Office”
If that’s the case then they needn’t have bothered developing OS X and could have merely improved on OS 9.
If that’s the case then they needn’t have bothered developing OS X and could have merely improved on OS 9.
No, it means they could just have easily based OS X on BeOS or NT – some of the other possibilities considered at the time – and ended up with a product just as valuable to their customers.