Thermonuclear sharks with lasers attached to their heads?
Trying to move more into the Linux mainstream (less of an oxymoronic phrase
every day), Sun Microsystems plans to support a number of Linux
distributions rather than continue selling its own Sun Linux.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30005.html
Flood Google News
We're asking all Infoshop News fans to email Google News to ask them to
include Infoshop News in their news service. Infoshop News was included
briefly, but has now disappeared. You can contact them at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun's Linux distro is dead
By Ashlee Vance in San Francisco
Posted: 28/03/2003 at 23:09 GMT
Sun Microsystems' branded Linux distribution has been extinguished before
it ever even caught a light.
The company will go with "standard distributions" instead. Sun refused to
utter the words Red Hat and SuSE, but we are quite sure those are the
"standard distributions" which it intends to offer on 32-bit hardware.
Interestingly, John Loiacono, vice president of operating platforms at Sun
said that the company now defines the ELC (Enterprise Linux Client) as
"software" rather than "hardware". A hint that Sun really, really doesn't
want to be in the box-shifting business when the Client launches in the
middle of this year.
Hand crafted
Loiacono said that customers do not really want a Sun crafted version of
Linux when more than ample OSes already exist.
Sun Linux has only been available since late last year on the LX50 server.
It walked hand in hand with Solaris x86 on this system and was to provide a
common link for Sun's desktop and low end Intel server efforts.
Solaris x86 was once shunned within Sun as well. The needy code required
large support investments and did little to support the real money maker --
Solaris for SPARC.
But Sun changed its mind with Solaris x86 and backs the OS with full force
now, saying that numerous Intel OEMs will start shipping it.
Sun has talked with "every major vendor you can imagine other than IBM,"
Loiacono said.
Companies such as Dell do ship Solaris x86 on their servers today when an
oppurtunity presents itself, but we have trouble believing that OEMs will
collectively jump at the chance to include Solaris x86 as an option even if
Sun has flip-flopped and decided to support it on various servers.
Client goes soft
For the ELC, Loiacono suggested that this product may not be hardware at
all but rather just a bundle of software, including an OS, email apps,
productivity suite, etc, that can run on any PC.
Sun likes to bundle software with its OSes wherever possible and Loiacono
had no shame when he compared Sun's strategy to Microsoft's great browser
bundling escapade.
He claims that Sun's enterprise oriented Project Orion is "redefining the
definition of the operating system" by including a huge stack of software
with every shipment of Solaris.
Customers can still buy software on per user or per processor basis for
indivudal products or they can go with Orion and pay one price for all the
software Sun makes. With Orion, Sun will charge customers based on how many
employees they have and then ship every server with Solaris, an application
server, web server, directory server, grid computing software, and the list
goes on.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun vice president in charge of software, is bullish on
Orion, to say the least.
"This is probably the single biggest shift in our software strategy in the
last decade," he said.
This seems to discount the operating systems that have been killed and
resurrected in the last year, the invention of Java and 64-bit Solaris just
in the last few years, but Schwartz's enthusiasm is appreciated.�
Related Stories
A brief note on Sun's Project Orion
