There are people who believe in the doctrine of social or historical inevitability: that, when the time is right and no earlier, several people will independently invent what turns out to be a crucial new technology.
My own theory on this is more cynical; I believe that several people probably invented calculus before either Sir Isaac Newton or Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnitz but couldn't popularize it. In other words, that it's not a question of the time being right for the invention, but one of society being ready to accept the sales pitch popularizing the invention.
That's been illustrated by the acceptance of open source over the last few years. In reality academics have applied the basic ideas behind open source--peer review and building on the work of others--since the formulation of the scientific method in the 15th century. It's only today, however, that the Internet has enabled the idea to explode out of academia and into daily commerce.
It's interesting, therefore, to ask whether Sun Microsystems' move to Open Solaris is anything more than just a case of jumping on a moving bandwagon.
I believe it is, but I don't know whether the decision reflected Sun's history and general support for open-source ideas or anticipation of what now look like the most likely consequences.
Look at Java today and you see an illustration of the opposite case: one in which it's fairly clear that the people at Sun who launched it had no idea how strategic it would become. Java started as a solution to a problem affecting many devices that embed software, including as the archetypical case the set-top Internet access controller James Gosling originally worked with.
The problem manufacturers face with these things is that both the hardware and the user software inevitably evolve, leaving the manufacturer to face the cost and complexity of supporting many different release combinations.
Java's answer was to modularize the problem by abstracting the hardware and so allow many generations of the user software to address the same virtual machine while also minimizing the cost of adapting to hardware change by limiting its impact.
Java's virtual machine solution is so obviously applicable to a wide variety of problems that Sun's senior management felt justified in budgeting for the work and later expanding Java marketing beyond the embedded SPARC part of their business through the creation of the worldwide Java development community.
As a result, at least three times as many people will use Java today as will use all Microsoft products put together--for example, more than 600 million people are likely to use a Java-enabled phone today. That was predictable, but what wasn't was that Java would also become the keystone element in Sun's commercial software offerings.
That didn't happen because Java is better than other languages like C. It isn't. In fact, it's an obvious kludge when used in business information processing. Java's ascendancy happened because Microsoft subverted the use of browsers as a kind of universal client while letting its own security and runtime inconsistency problems get worse.
IBM is effectively taking over Linux, not through ownership but by influencing the influencers: manipulating the people and press involved in guiding its use, evolution and acceptance.
As a result, software developers first adopted the Java virtual machine on the Wintel PC as a way of getting on the Microsoft desktop while limiting their exposure to Wintel change. They then pushed Java onto the server in response to escalating security and performance issues on that desktop PC.
Java is now a key component of Sun's overall business strategy, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim or Gosling had the faintest idea in January 1991 that Java would eventually form the mold shaping Sun's commercial software as a mirror image response to Microsoft's mind-share dominance.
Of course, that was yesterday. Tomorrow most of Solaris will be open source, and the question is whether history will repeat itself with the unanticipated consequences ultimately becoming of greater strategic importance to the company than anything management planned for.
At least part of what Sun's senior people intend to do with Open Solaris is pretty clear. The license Sun plans to use fundamentally says that extensions or improvements on open-source code have to be open source too, but plug-ins to open-source code do not. This lets developers have their cake and eat it too: working within an open-source environment while retaining the opportunity to realize on any competitive advantage arising from their intellectual property.
That should attract a lot of Linux developers to Solaris because its ability to run Linux applications means that they can build for Linux while sheltering their work under the Sun license--and simultaneously escape the limitations of x86 by getting into the SPARC market.
Since developers are the lifeblood of a systems company, attracting more of the better ones is pretty strategic--in fact, this is business cool at its best and clearly what Sun's top executives intended when they undertook the process.
Like Java, however, Open Solaris may play an unexpected role in Sun's longer term strategic positioning--in this case vis-a-vis IBM, not Microsoft.
I believe IBM is effectively taking over Linux, not through ownership but by influencing the influencers: manipulating the people and press involved in guiding its use, evolution and acceptance. Witness, for example, IBM's success in manipulating the press and lots of serious Linux players with regard first to the SCO lawsuit and, more recently, in the fawning attention paid its opening of 500 mostly expiring, and mostly irrelevant to open source, patents.
As Linux succeeds, it diminishes the role of Windows, and therefore, the importance of Java outside the telecommunications and related embedded processor arenas. In effect, I think we'll see Java's data center role becoming "collateral damage" as IBM uses Linux to take out Microsoft. That might be bad news for Sun, except that Open Solaris redresses the balance: favoring Linux over Microsoft but dramatically tilting the open-source playing field Sun's way.
Assuming it does play out that way, Open Solaris may go down in history as one the finest examples of business strategy ever--unless, of course, it's just dumb luck.
Biography Paul Murphy wrote and published The Unix Guide to Defenestration. He is a 20-year veteran of the IT consulting industry.
Ubiquitous linux but still the need for java ... yes!
If Linux does and I believe it will become over time ubiquitous on many platforms thanks in part to revolutionary projects like <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.cosmopod.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.cosmopod.com</a> that provide free personal online desktops to embeded linux projects like embedded-linux.org and really the whole OS community.
So if every computing device ran Linux one may say that Java would no longer be needed as any compiled code would run nativly. This is but one of Java's strong points the other major advantage to Java is that it runs in a contained virtual machine, this does and will more so in the future with vicous ad and spyware included in almost every program one downloads offer huge security advantages too.
I think you are somewhat mistaken vis-a-vis the point of the article. It would be wonderful to think that spyware and adware would vanish overnight if everyone used Linux. Fortunately or un-, Windows would still exist, even if Linux became a dominant business platform and had acceptance beyond that to personal desktops. But the caveat there would be that the guys writing the 'pay for play' plugins, might decide that ads are okay, and put them in commercial code that plugs into the Linux kernel. Of course, only those lusers that ended up being dumb enough to use such plugins would have problems, but if the incentive to use the plugin is high enough, it might fly. But probably NOT. As to security, I am sure the Linux platform will soon be under attack just like Windows is. In some areas, Linux can and does outdo Windows for security, but NOT all, by any stretch. Security is an issue for EVERYONE. Besides, Windows will still be around for the serious gamers to use. It's not a bad multimedia platform, when you get it to behave. Yes, Java is good for some things, but again, not all. OpenSolaris will be good for a lot of things, but not all. The GOOD thing coming out of all this is that there will be MORE CHOICE available to the users, be they business oriented, or gaming oriented. Choice is a good thing. No one platform can be EVERYTHING to all users. One of the choices will SUCK at some aspect the end user is looking for, and one will SHINE for what THEY want. NOT what the OS wants, but what the end user wants. It truly BITES when Microsoft starts taking such STUPID steps to protect their IP stranglehold on the market, as their recent 'Phone Home to Activate' program. I am going to stop installing WinXP of ANY flavor, until this goes away. But you can't game worth a tinker's trash pile with Linux, unless you use software to do it. So what's a user to do? Ya end up using both, though one of the choices really sucks at something. Be it 'Activate by Phone' or 'Emulate Windows to Play', there are drawbacks to each. But at LEAST WE HAVE A CHOICE!!! (My two cents worth)
Here's a guy who literally wrote a book about Unix and who thinks that open sourcing Solaris was a great strategic move. Instead of paying Sun managment a compliment he prefers to chalk it up to "dumb luck." LMAO!
I can't say I blame the guy. Senior Sun management seems more interested in proving themselves "visionary" and "right" while the company's revenue and stock price go nowhere in a hurry. Sun management needs to stop telling audiences to Google on their assertions from 5 years ago. They need to stop insulting their customers (calling their data centers "jalopies"). They need to stop insulting CIO's (likening them to "chief electricity officers"). Sun is the most horribly marketed company I can think of. Who wants to pay them any compliments?
"escape the limitations of x86 by getting into the SPARC market"
Try this on current users of Sun/SPARC systems. They will laugh thru tears. They'd love to escape cost of SPARC, but they are unable to escape to highly unstable x86. I see more people - more than I anticipated - moving to PowerPC.
What would change Open Source Solaris? I doubt in couple years some-one will remember. Closed Source Solaris? - will live even then.
And this laughable appeal "run Linux binaries" is totaly bogus: accepting restrictive license agreement just to run executable you can run absolutely for free? You must be joking.
IBM is being very moderate and hands-off with The SCO Group. The short story is that TSG went on a fishing expedition and caught Leviathan rather than the snapper they were after. Instead of running away screaming as they should have, they decided to brazen it out, making their SNAFU far worse than it should have been. Most of the key players on TSG's side don't seem able to find their own butts even given both hands, approach radar and a map. All IBM really has had to do is say "we didn't do it" and wait for TSG to exceed critical mass. No conspiracies here, Paul, move along.
Linux is not *capable* of being taken over. There are no suitable political or commercial handles to grab it by. Trying it is like trying to eat clear soup with a fork.
Solaris is trying to compete with Linux. To me that is like trying to compete with the Internet.
Why would developers work for Sun for nothing, when they can contribute to a platform that everybody owns and benfits?
Linux may not be the best right now, but it will be. Linux jumps in leaps and bounds today because it is free and promotes sharing of innovation. It is a platform that you can contribute to and also own. It is not owned by any one company but by all and there is no fear that a company can pull the rug from under your feet because there is no one company or owner.
Open Solaris will prove to have a business value to Sun only if it manages to drive users toward SPARC and away from commodity x86 hardware. The problem here is that the market trends are clear to everyone but Sun's management (and true believers like Paul): SPARC is rapidly becoming a legacy platform.
Can Open Solaris somehow rescue SPARC? I fail to see how. It's certainly true that Solaris on SPARC presently enjoys some real advantages over Linux on x86, but that has obviously not been enough to stop the mass exodus to commodity hardware.
So what does Open Solaris bring to the table? Not much really, except a new Sun "committment" to an x86 port of Solaris. Of course, Sun can't subsist as commodity hardware vendor absent a fundmental corporate restructuring they've been loath to even entertain. Sun's future is still firmly wedded to the SPARC architecture and nobody has explained how in the world Open Solaris will supposedly drive new adoptions of SPARC.
Paul doesn't even explicitly mention the real imminent threat facing Sun, which is IBM's Power architecture. IBM beat Sun in the engineering competition and they beat them badly. Power is more scalable, more featureful, and, most importantly, it is significantly cheaper--and rapidly getting cheaper still as the economies of scale kick in from IBM's successful wins in the embedded market.
Power/AIX/Linux is the one-two punch which will eventually prove fatal to Sun.
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So if every computing device ran Linux one may say that Java would no longer be needed as any compiled code would run nativly. This is but one of Java's strong points the other major advantage to Java is that it runs in a contained virtual machine, this does and will more so in the future with vicous ad and spyware included in almost every program one downloads offer huge security advantages too.
I can't say I blame the guy. Senior Sun management seems more interested in proving themselves "visionary" and "right" while the company's revenue and stock price go nowhere in a hurry. Sun management needs to stop telling audiences to Google on their assertions from 5 years ago. They need to stop insulting their customers (calling their data centers "jalopies"). They need to stop insulting CIO's (likening them to "chief electricity officers"). Sun is the most horribly marketed company I can think of. Who wants to pay them any compliments?
Try this on current users of Sun/SPARC systems. They will laugh thru tears. They'd love to escape cost of SPARC, but they are unable to escape to highly unstable x86. I see more people - more than I anticipated - moving to PowerPC.
What would change Open Source Solaris? I doubt in couple years some-one will remember.
Closed Source Solaris? - will live even then.
And this laughable appeal "run Linux binaries" is totaly bogus: accepting restrictive license agreement just to run executable you can run absolutely for free? You must be joking.
SCO Group. The short story is that TSG went on a
fishing expedition and caught Leviathan rather
than the snapper they were after. Instead of
running away screaming as they should have, they
decided to brazen it out, making their SNAFU far
worse than it should have been. Most of the key
players on TSG's side don't seem able to find
their own butts even given both hands, approach
radar and a map. All IBM really has had to do is
say "we didn't do it" and wait for TSG to exceed
critical mass. No conspiracies here, Paul, move
along.
Linux is not *capable* of being taken over. There
are no suitable political or commercial handles
to grab it by. Trying it is like trying to eat
clear soup with a fork.
Why would developers work for Sun for nothing, when they can contribute to a platform that everybody owns and benfits?
Linux may not be the best right now, but it will be. Linux jumps in leaps and bounds today because it is free and promotes sharing of innovation. It is a platform that you can contribute to and also own. It is not owned by any one company but by all and there is no fear that a company can pull the rug from under your feet because there is no one company or owner.
You can't beat that. It's a revolution.
Can Open Solaris somehow rescue SPARC? I fail to see how. It's certainly true that Solaris on SPARC presently enjoys some real advantages over Linux on x86, but that has obviously not been enough to stop the mass exodus to commodity hardware.
So what does Open Solaris bring to the table? Not much really, except a new Sun "committment" to an x86 port of Solaris. Of course, Sun can't subsist as commodity hardware vendor absent a fundmental corporate restructuring they've been loath to even entertain. Sun's future is still firmly wedded to the SPARC architecture and nobody has explained how in the world Open Solaris will supposedly drive new adoptions of SPARC.
Paul doesn't even explicitly mention the real imminent threat facing Sun, which is IBM's Power architecture. IBM beat Sun in the engineering competition and they beat them badly. Power is more scalable, more featureful, and, most importantly, it is significantly cheaper--and rapidly getting cheaper still as the economies of scale kick in from IBM's successful wins in the embedded market.
Power/AIX/Linux is the one-two punch which will eventually prove fatal to Sun.