Charlie Babcock just published a report on Sun’s new strategy aimed at Web 2.0 developers. Charlie’s one of the best trade reporters in the business, but I would have loved for the LF to have been asked to comment on CEO Jonathan’s statements.
First off, the report says Sun’s new strategy is to target Web 2.0 developers. Much like their decision to open source Solaris, this strikes me as of course the obvious and smart thing to do, but a little too late. In similar news, I am planning a huge Y2K party to usher in the millennium. We’re going to party like it’s 1999!
I’d also like to ask which and how many Web 2.0 developers? You mean the ones who are not on Linux? Unfortunately that doesn’t leave very many. Facebook, Amazon’s cloud computing initiatives, Google, YouTube, Flickr, Technorati, Wikipedia, Digg, del.icio.us all run on Linux. New developers are targeting Linux. Why? Cost, choice and talent pool. When you’re a small company, you need the most leverage against vendors to keep your costs down. Linux provides this with its thriving support from multiple companies and hardware platforms. You’re not locked into a company, a platform or distribution. (Developers can even buy Linux from Sun. I hear through the grapevine that 70% of their x86 sales are Linux — not Solaris, 10, Open or otherwise. Quite a damning figure but not surprisingly omitted from Jonathan’s slides.)
Platforms are all about momentum. You want to be able to hire from the deepest and broadest talent pool as possible for both developers and operational professionals. You want to know the platform has a community to continue to expand functionality. This means Linux; just compare market share numbers and you’ll see what I mean. I’m sure Sun can point to a few examples of Web 2.0 companies they have convinced, via generous hardware gifts, to go with them and publicly talk about it. (I once did PR for Sun and remember.) But I would love to see reporters and analysts compare the numbers and push a little further. Instead of anecdotes, lets look at numbers and momentum.
Next Jonathan talks about their recent acquisition of MySQL. “MySQL brings another key set of developers, the users of the integrated open source LAMP stack, he said. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Perl. The “L” doesn’t have to be taken literally, he added. Sun can and will substitute Solaris for Linux in the stack.”
Really, Jonathan? Sun can certainly substitute Solaris for Linux in the stack, but I’m not sure many customers will. (Customers tend to be pretty literal in their technology decisions.) Why would a “young Internet company” tie their business to a platform with shrinking market share and a tiny non-Sun developer base? We are confident MySQL will continue supporting Linux as its primary platform partner since that is where they make their sales. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos in fact will be speaking on this topic at our upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
I certainly agree with Jonathan here: “Everything,” he said, “begins with the development of a community,” such as the Sun Developer Network or the OpenSolaris community of developers.”
This is why the L in Lamp is Linux and Literal. Linux has the broadest and most active development community of any open source project. Linux has over 3,000 developers contributing to just the kernel in the last year, while Sun has announced 70 non-Sun engineers. (This doesn’t even account for the vibrant development communities around Linux community distributions, desktop toolkits and other upstream projects outside of the kernel.)
The Linux development community keeps getting stronger while Sun’s is seeing public defections of some of its most important members due to Sun’s control. Mike Dolan does a nice analysis here.
We may not have the targeted marketing campaigns that Sun has given the distributed and community nature of Linux. We may not do all the spin Jonathan does in misleading blog posts like this. (You may want to examine the count leading to Solaris’ “third place finish” cited in this post. It’s wrong and hardly something to crow about given Solaris’ traditional incumbent advantage in this very specific market.) We may not have fancy Linux analyst days and mountains of spin, but it is all about the development community. Literally.
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February 18, 2008 at 1:06 am
Niklas Andersson, TechWorld Open Source
Hi Amanda and thanks for a great post.
I agree that customers are unlikely to switch the “L” for “S” but one thing to take into consideration is Suns effort in the virtualization area and try to read between the lines.
With their openxVM and recent acquisition of Innotek (VirtualBox) they have a complete virtualization stack + the hardware to run it. With openxVM Sun is able to leverage their ZFS filesystem from the host (Solaris) operatingsystem to the guests (Linux, Windows, Solaris). Another sign is that Sun also incorporates CIFS into their kernel and in some way leaving Samba behind.
Me personally, think that Sun is aiming for beeing a complete Web 2.0-vendor able to provide both the hardware, the virtualization mechanisms and the software. They did buy Ian Murdock…
What is more “worrying” according to my opinion is all these “Contributors licenses” i.e “MySQL Contributors license”, “Innotek Contributors License”. “JCE” etc.. I’m not sure whether it’s good or bad that a single corporate entity is the sole copyright owner of the entire project - or as in Sun’s case - the entire Web 2.0-stack…
February 18, 2008 at 2:19 am
Jim Grisanzio
You sound pretty upset with us. Why? The Linux community is so much bigger than the OpenSolaris community because it’s been open for so much longer. And there are a lot of really amazing Linux developers and companies as well. Every time I go to a Linux user group meeting here in Tokyo I’m treated with huge respect. And I always go back and tell the OpenSolaris community that we can learn a great deal from the Linux guys. I’ve been saying that for years, actually. So why the hostility from you and Michael? I responded to Michael here, by the way: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/a_chuckle. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the two communities. It’s fine for the various vendors to compare products as they compete for customers, and Linux and Solaris will certainly be compared in that respect, but I don’t see any value in the communities poking at each other. It’s really very discouraging.
February 18, 2008 at 5:45 am
Patrick Finch
(NB. I am a Sun employee)
Hi Amanda,
Maybe Charlie Babcock knew what he was doing.
You say, “We are confident MySQL will continue supporting Linux as its primary platform partner since that is where they make their sales.”
Jonathan Schwartz says (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/in_a_vortex)
“Will you change their platform priorities?
Absolutely not.
Why not?
Because the L in LAMP stands for Linux, not Looney. Customers prioritize MySQL’s platform choices, not Sun. ”
Which doesn’t mean to say, as you seem to imply, that every MySQL or Apache user must deploy on Linux, does it? Just that most deploy on Linux but they can also deploy on Solaris, BSD, or indeed, closed source platforms.
As for this:
“We may not have the targeted marketing campaigns that Sun has given the distributed and community nature of Linux. ”
You may not have, but what about the IBM-Red Hat joint marketing initiatives? The Novell-Microsoft initiative? You may not be managing them them from within the Linux Foundation, but Linux has an enormous marketing spend behind it in the enterprise space. We can only hope to see the same in the home desktop market one day.
However, to point to Linux’ volume in the marketplace while simultaneously playing the underdog smacks a little of, well, spin, no?
“Platforms are all about momentum.” Fine. But what’s momentum all about?
February 18, 2008 at 6:24 am
Mike Dolan
Yes, yes, and yes. This Sun nonsense needs to be called out; it’s great to see someone else actually looking into the critical details behind Sun’s fluffy marketing.
February 18, 2008 at 6:33 am
Robby Russell
Well said. I have some colleagues in the Ruby on Rails community who have tried to deploy their applications on Sun. The last that I heard… many of them were back on Linux (or FreeBSD). At Planet Argon, we’re deploying web 2.0(tm) applications on Linux and will continue to do so as it’s cost-effective for our clients and has a larger community driving development.
February 19, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Roy Schestowitz
Hi Amanda,
As someone who advocates Linux passionately, I’d advise against provoking a war of words again Sun. Other companies will use it against us.
Take care, I’m subscribed to this blog now.
February 19, 2008 at 11:37 pm
David Comay
Amanda,
I don’t have a lot to add to what my colleagues, Jim and Patrick, have already said. But I did want to comment on a few things.
You’re right that Sun was behind in recognizing the significance of the Web 2.0 market and it’s perhaps unlikely that any of the existing Linux users you mentioned will be switching to an OpenSolaris platform. However, this market certainly continues to grow and though you may have the home field advantage so to speak at the moment, it’s certainly the case that OpenSolaris offers some compelling reasons for new companies and developers to take a look at it. And yes, there is a large talent pool around Linux that is impressive. However, there is also a great deal of excitement around technologies such as ZFS which are causing many folks to take a look at OpenSolaris. There are schools where OpenSolaris is being introduced into the classroom and over time, I expect the talent pool “knowing” OpenSolaris technologies to grow as well.
You take a rather cynical viewpoint when you claim that Sun likely provided gifts of hardware to some Web 2.0 startups to get them to talk about Sun and/or OpenSolaris. That seems a rather serious accusation but you don’t provide any details to back up your claim. Of course, I suspect all system vendors do provide hardware at discounts or perhaps even at no cost in order to get potential customers to evaluate it.
As to the number of kernel developers, I think it’s fantastic that Linux has such a large number. Of course as an open-source project, Linux has been around for quite a bit longer than OpenSolaris. The fact is that until the code was open-sourced three years ago, the only folks who had access to the source were folks able to pay for a source license. The knowlege about the kernel was at Sun. As such, it takes time for that knowledge to disseminate. So comparing 3,500 to 70 is hardly a fair comparison. At the very least, you need to include the employees of Sun that works on OpenSolaris to make a half-way fair comparison.
You paint the “defection” of Roy (as you call it) in the most negative way possible (something that Michael did as well in his blog post.). While Roy brings up (as always) a lot of important points in his message, it’s also not the complete story as far as I know. And though I definitely wished he had chosen to continue in the community, the community will continue to thrive even without his wise counsel. I do wonder though if you would paint a similar sort of event in the Linux world the same way. But of course, such things never happen there, do they?
I have to echo Patrick finally about your “observation” of Sun spin. I think we at Sun can only wish we were as good at that skill as you and Mike seem to be.
@Robby, I would love to hear from you (if you’re actually interested in providing feedback) on issues your colleagues in the Rails community had with OpenSolaris. There are a number of large Rails developers that have found OpenSolaris indispensable when developing and deploying Rails applications in production using tools like DTrace. So it would be of interest to hear from others in that community who have had problems.
February 20, 2008 at 12:39 am
Jeff Chew
Well, I have to be honest here, what’s the big deal? I don’t see Sun doing anything different that the Linux community did and continues to do with regard to MSFT.
Sun is taking a stance, and offering an alternative. I say GREAT. Amanda, if they are not a threat, then why do you care? If they do not offer a realistic option, why the venom? I don’t see him saying anything that is out of turn, except that his company is offering an alternative platform that they think will be useful.
I remember 10 years ago the Linux community having the same issue. A lot of people scoffed at the idea that it would eventually do much. It has. I say applaud Sun for being strong enough to let go of their dream of being a leading hardware and platform provider and joining the OPEN Source world.
February 20, 2008 at 2:39 am
sam varghese
Sun is a company which wants to be a little bit pregnant - an unfortunate choice, indeed. By delaying the open-sourcing of Java, it put a lot of developers offside. Then it’s started doing a fan dance with Solaris. By the time Sun realises that open source means exactly that - freeing up code for developers to play with - the company may not be around in its current shape. Pity, because guys like Bechtolsheim and Joy really had the right idea when they started Sun along with McNealy and Khosla.
February 20, 2008 at 11:04 am
Amanda McPherson
Thanks, everyone, for the comments. @ Jim and other Sun employees: I appreciate your point of view, but I disagree when you say it’s not fair to compare the two communities. Believe me, I would much rather focus on Microsoft and helping improve Linux (not preferably in that order). Sun has great products, wonderful people and a long history of innovation and success. Ideally, we could combine our open communities and technologies and work together. Perhaps this will be possible sometime in the future. But for now, you can’t have it both ways.
When you tout your product and your growing community, as Jonathan did here: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/communities_then_customers_forrester_on
you can’t claim talking about communities is out of the question. That would be like me saying to you (or Ian or Jonathan, etc), “It’s not fair to talk about ZFS and DTrace. You guys have a longer history than Linux and you just can’t compare features to features.” Of course you’re going to highlight those features. Just like of course we’re going to highlight our community (and our driver support, our dominance in Super Computing and so on). When you talk about ZFS and Dtrace it should inspire the Linux community. Competition is good.
So what compelled me to respond? Statements like Jonathan’s in the above post or Jim’s that OpenSolaris is “leading against Linux” (”We’re somewhat new at it, but we are catching up (and in some markets leading, such as the European finance market that Forrester just documented))” should be responded to. Have you really looked at those numbers? I have and come to a different conclusion.
I am merely pointing out that Linux is the leading OS for Web 2.0 companies, that the L in LAMP does matter because that is what the majorities of customers/developers use (just as the M does matter) and that analysts, press and customers should ask for specifics when a CEO and others tout community and analyst numbers that are confusing.
I’m really happy we are having this discussion and hope we can continue it and work together to promote open operating systems of all kinds. The real choice is open vs. closed, and in that fight, we are certainly on the same side!
[OK, I’m changing my title to Director of Hand Waving. ;)]
February 20, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Sam Hiser
Amanda -
Nicely posted.
There’s an absurdity to Jonathan’s statement, “…the ‘L’ is not literal…” which parallels other Kafka-esque trends passing under Sun’s auspices.
Namely, I am thinking of the principal espoused through Sun’s leadership of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee which says most interoperability facilities in that format’s questionable spec are “optional”. For a format specification, such optionality says, “Only apply to the original. No others may conform.” This is a paradox for a format that is supposed to be free for anyone to implement because alternative implementations won’t work.
It suggests they are breathing some rarefied air in MtnView because even the market advantages they would hope to obtain from these self-defeating behaviors are difficult to see. It is puzzling how grown & educated — mostly — men can pursue such comical threads while continuing to take themselves so seriously.
This is the answer: we are in a Comedy! I knew it was something.
Viva la ponytail!
February 20, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Laurence J.
Linux offers much and becomes more impressive with time. But, it makes little sense to heap scorn on the OS which served as the model for Linux (i.e. the AT&T/Berkeley Unix SVR4-lineage, where much of R4 was coded by Sun programmers under contract to AT&T). Certainly there are differences in Linux and Unix, especially in the kernel - but there are many more points of similarity.
It does sound sophisticated to demand source code for your OS. But, how many Linux Systems Administrators actually modify and re-compile Linux sources in the course of their work? I would guess very, very few - with perhaps a much different answer among developers.
Also, when you say that 70% of Sun’s x86 sales are Linux, that can be a little misleading because Sun is still largely a hardware and integration company, specializing in upscale, multi-SPARC-cpu servers and storage. With many of Sun’s bread-n-butter Enterprise sales, the OS price is an afterthought on the bill of sale, and many large customers routinely (re)install the OS to their rightfully picky specs anyway. Sun’s Enterprise sales are driven by high-end, SPARC-based servers running 64-bit Solaris 10, sold into markets like Telecomm, Scientific R&D or larger ISPs where such boxes often run for many months between reboots - while largely delivering on customer requirements of nearly 100% uptime.
On the other hand, while most of Sun’s x86 platforms (until Sun recently added Intel Xeon-based servers) have actually been AMD Opteron x64 systems, Solaris 10 for Intel is still only available as a 32-bit OS (the Sun SPARC-cpu version of Solaris has been 64-bit for the last few releases, with transparent-to-user automatic handling of 32-bit SPARC executables).
February 20, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Brian Aker
Hi!
Be confident that MySQL will continue to be developed for and supported on Linux. Many of us have been strong supporters of Linux for a very long time and we will not change that.
It is not just rhetoric that Sun bought us to learn from us. I’ve been pleasantly surprised as to the effect we are already having on Sun. This is not to say that MySQL is the perfect open source model, while we are organic, we still have miles to go to be better at taking community contributions.
Cheers,
-Brian
February 21, 2008 at 3:49 am
Patrick Finch
Amanda, thanks for your good-natured responses.
To your point, “Ideally, we could combine our open communities and technologies and work together. ” We can, we do, and we should do more (there is a lot of code common to the Linux distributions and OpenSolaris, contributed by many, many parties, including Sun).
As for the kernels themselves, well, Jonathan invited Linus to dinner, didn’t he?
February 21, 2008 at 6:40 am
Segedunum
The migration from Solaris to Linux platforms has happened for many years, particularly in educational establishments. The issue of open source software support has been the main one, with issues such as Python and threading under Solaris. These are not new issues. The fact is, Linux and various BSDs are far more suitable for running a the wide variety of open source software that various people want to run on such platforms.
As far as I’m concerned, LAMP has turned into LAPP. Postgres has excellent performance and a lot of tuning options now, still has excellent and first-class support for features that MySQL doesn’t have or hasn’t had for very long, is more ANSI SQL compliant and the number one reason why people used MySQL - performance - has now all but evaporated. I really haven’t got the faintest idea why Sun bought MySQL, or what they’re going to do with it. We’ve all seen Sun spend billions on acquiring companies, only to have them simply not know what to do with them. Cobalt was a case in point.
Mind you, I haven’t got a clue what a ‘Web 2.0 market’ is. It’s merely people producing the same web applications they have always produced whilst throwing some AJAX at a web browser.
February 21, 2008 at 12:28 pm
paul
Gosh, will this infighting never end?
Sun is the best ally Open Source in general has right now. So theu push Solaris. Do you really blame them? If you had created one of the most stable OSes in the world, would you suddenly abandon it?
Sun does not push Solaris first and then bad mouth Linux. Yes past statements do come to haunt Sun in some respects, but everything I have seen lately from Sun=best Corporate friend to Open Source. I welcome an Open Solaris. I am a huge Liniux fan as well. The two OSes are very similar.
Linux has momentum and a great deal of developers committed to Linux as well. That is super!! Open Solaris has a much smaller community of developers, but at least the Sun employees have a great deal of experience with the Sun OS. Experience can trumph numbers. Sometimes a smaller team=greater efficiency.
But I do not want to get too caught up in the nuances and rather focus on the market and choice. Personally, I do not care WHERE my applications live as long as they function as expected and provide me with my six absolutes for consideration and deployment: (1) Secure, (2) Scalable, (4) Efficient, (5) Cost effective, and most importantly, (6) Reliable.
I will even extend my six absolutes to any OS, even including MS. However, MS does not pass my list of absolutes and couple that with the fact it is CLOSED SOURCE, and it is not even an option to consider.
Give me a Sun or a Linux OS and I am happy!!
February 21, 2008 at 3:58 pm
David Comay
Amanda, I think what you’re saying is the “L” in LAMP matter because it stands for Linux and by extension, you’re saying the OS matters. And I completely agree with that sentiment. The OS is a crucial differentiator and both Linux and OpenSolaris have features that make them suitable in various spaces. Certainly the large community of Linux developers is a critical aspect of the OS just as many technologies (like SMF, to use something different from DTrace and ZFS) or design principles (like an emphasis on compatibility) have critical to users of OpenSolaris. In many ways, I see our respective communities moving closer to one another in terms of technology (certainly OpenSolaris is adopting to many of the paradigms around packaging that GNU/Linux and other open source operating systems have pioneered.)
Laurence J, just a correction - Solaris has been available in 64-bit form for AMD64 and EMT processors since Solaris 10 was shipped three years ago.
In fact, it’s exactly the same OS as the 32-bit version since in OpenSolaris there is a single distribution that boots both 32-bit or 64-bit on 64-bit hardware.
February 23, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Kern
Some points
Sun is a *hardware* company.
Because the that hardware is proprietary, they have to build their
own OS, compiler, X server, desktop system (CDE), the whole platform called
Solaris on Sparc.
Now of course this is *way* to expensive and the alternatives are better
and a lot cheaper.
Linux has taken some, however in fact Windows has taken a lot more of market share from Sun (AIX, IRIX, HP-UX etc).
Just look up the numbers from Gartner, e.g.
http://www.itjungle.com/two/two060204-story03.html
Something has to be done. But what?
Hey! The Linux stack is free. Wow! Red Hat are doing just fine.
Let’s copy that!
Bootloader: grub
Desktop: gnome
X server: xorg
Of cource Solaris must be Solaris, all GNU stuff are hiding in /usr/sfw . Great!
It did not work. We much do more to copy Linux.
Hey, I am Ian from DebIAN. Nice to see you.
You can copy Linux!
Enter: Indiana, now OpenSolaris distro.
Solaris users: we don’t want that GPL stuff first in $PATH. Where is /bin/sh? WTF!
Of course this copy Linux act will not work out.
In the mean time Windows’ market share has gone even larger.
Maybe Sun should target the really enemy (Windows) in stead of going after Linux?
February 24, 2008 at 6:13 am
Apostolos S
Since when grub. gnome and xorg are Linux-only applications? And since when Open Source equals Linux? GNU-Linux exists simply because some people developed free tools (compilers, linkers, assemblers, etc.) on “non-free” operating systems like Solaris. Also, could you please let me know what are the novelties introduced by GNU-Linux?