[wellylug] Sun confirms plans to open source Solaris

[Simon Anderson]

On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Rob Giltrap wrote:
> Which is why they are so hyped about Opteron, they just put John Fowler, 
> one of their up and coming superstar (and technically competent) 
> managers in charge of the rapidly expanding Opteron product line and 
> have gotten back Sun Employee #1 Andy B with his Opteron techo company.

I would say that Bechtolsheim's reputation is overshadowed by that of Bill 
Joy, whose resignation letter from Sun I include here in full for your 
amusement; 

:q!

> Hehe, I'm sure he did! But not anymore... With Jonathon Schwartz in 
> charge they are truly going "Systems" rather than just talking about it. 
> This gets Sun back to it's workstation roots, pulling together commodity 
> parts and producing great systems, just that now it is not just hardware 
> and an OS but a much larger software stack. This process has only just 
> started but it is well on track.

That is a good strategy, but one which is shared by many of the other main 
players, especialy MS, Novell (both utilising commodity hardware) and IBM, 
HP (providing the hardware as well) so it's shaping up as a competetive 
landscape. As an aside, as I'm sure you're aware HP announced it's going 
to work with JBoss/MySQL to plug the gaping whole in their portfolio - 
everyone is on the same page.

> And playing the game they are...
> 
> - JDS & Star/OpenOffice are having freakishly good success where tipping 
> points are being reached in some markets.

Do you know Glynn Foster? He's the Irish Sun engineer based in 
Christchurch assigned to GNOME. He often has often offers valuable 
insights on this topic through his blog;

http://www.gnome.org/~gman/blog/

> - The new SPARC CMT chips really are a trump card because they not only 
> make for a better chip but also revolutionise the chip design process so 
> you don't have billion dollar fiascos like Itanium.

And Solaris has the multithreading architecture to make the most of it, as 
one would expect.

> - Solaris x86 (now that it is getting the treatment by Sun it deserves) 
> is getting huge support

Years ago I obtained Solaris 7 Intel, I think for the princely sum of 
£10. The CD arrived and a driver diskette.*One* diskette.

In terms of the systems paradigm you mention above, Solaris on x86 can 
fly, but in terms of general deployment on everyday systems, the hardware 
support isn't ever going to be available - though in Sun's defence, it 
probably wouldn't have even if they hadn't ignored Solaris Intel for all 
those years.

> - Solaris 10 is cool and sets Sun up for some real "Systems" plays

I'm particularly looking forward to playing with ZFS, hoping that it lives 
up to the hype (which it will, coming from the folk who gave us NFS.)
 
> - The new management team are awesome, no more technically savvy but 
> really marketing managers. The senior ranks are now filled with 
> marketing savvy but really technical engineering managers. It's back to 
> the good old days of engineering first.

With the obvious exception of McNealy. I haven't been following the 
movements inside Sun lately, but I've been watching the talent leave for a 
while now, so you'll forgive me if I take your analysis with a grain of 
salt :)

-Simon.