Sun CEO’s answer to Microsoft

Jonathan kept repeating that line about not litigating against their customers over and over last week @ JavaOne.

Now you can really say that MS is trying to "reboot" the web, or suing it out of existence. Still waiting for a detailed list of the patent infringements, I wonder if it's legal to not make those public for so long.

"All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all)."

Great quote, and very true. Some media companies are figuring this out, some are still trying to sue their customers. The latter are headed for extinction, or massive structural change brought on by falling revenue. Who wants to be bullied into buying?

Two thoughts:

1. You can't litigate if you don't have any IP being infringed upon.
2. Where is all this litigation that people keep referring to?

To date, I've seen a statement of concern by one party (Microsoft) that can be refuted or challenged by other parties (FOSS community, other vendors, customers). Absent active lawsuits or legal demands, isn't this all speculation?

Microsoft gets hit with huge patent infringement lawsuits all the time. They do a little saber rattling to indicate they are capable of fighting back or at the very least exposing how ridiculous the current system is.

However last I checked, MSFT hasn't sued anyone so Mr. Schwartz is jumping the gun to take a swipe at 'em.

To hear the CEO of Sun say:

“In essence, we decided to innovate, not litigate.”

is kind of humorous. I can't think of (m)any companies that were bigger chearleaders for government to litigate against Microsoft. But maybe it's a sea change in the philosophy for Sun. Maybe if Sun had been more interested in innovating back then instead of hoping government litigation would benefit them then maybe they'd be more relevant today.

@John Gibson

Nobody is jumping the gun here, this is the natural result of MS's well orchestrated FUD campaign. I can already feel the ripples, and have people asking "can we use open source software at all"? I'm sure that's part of the intended reason for these outrageous claims.

What's extra irresponsible is to make these statements and not list the patents in question. You can't just make these accusations and not provide any information. The intent here is to just scare people off open source software, while you and some here "trust" MS to not litigate against anybody the rest of the world doesn't have that trust at all. It truly would be infantile for any corporation to not wonder if they are going to be in the "hit list" if they use OSS, given MS statements.

I'm also wondering what Miguel de Icaza thinks about this, as EVERYBODY warned him against this exact scenario.

>"Maybe if Sun had been more interested in innovating back then instead of hoping government litigation would benefit them then maybe they’d be more relevant today."

Jayson: When I worked the camera store counter in Silicon Valley back in the 1980s I remember Apple employees were hoping that their lawsuit against Microsoft would prove fruitful. It didn't. But I remember thinking the same thing back then.

Good point!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&a...

I bought this Netra T4 for about 1800 USD in late 2005 including the other sparc PU I put in it and the AC power supply I swapped into it to get rid of the DC. This server costs 12k new(such as the new Netra 240)

It ran like ANY OTHER x86 server that costs a few hundred bucks. In 1 year time depreciated in value by 300% +. All it did was sit in a datacenter and run as an application server.

What is Sun hardware?

Power savings? Maybe, but it's not significant enough to matter, above a marketing ploy.
Is Sun hardware BIG HEAVY cases that matter to telecom?
Yes, it is. That is the only advantage of Sun gear. The BIG HEAVY cases and cooling systems. They are slowly losing the market to Red Hat.

I have tried Sun thin clients, and see no real advantage over secure VNC which you can run on Linux for free.

Sun better do what it does best and stay with telecom, or it better CHANGE IT'S HARDWARE big time for consumers. Solaris being GPLv3 won't change anything if nobody runs it. All this time, and they still do not have SPARC builds of Java JRE for Linux like Ubuntu or RH???
You still can't build a GPL Java, and still have to use gcj.

I dunno. Telecom must look awful good to Sun, because they have done little for the small business consumer market these past few years.

Tell the grocery store chain to switch to Sun and plop 400 pound cases with 12 inch CPUs under the counter. Or to make them code custom thin client applications that frankly cost more and take more time than using regular network protocol or RPC for data exchange.
Sun == Telecom and those with wild and exotic hardware specs.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did

"We supported Linux on our SPARC systems, and forced ourselves to open up every business we operate"

Really, Did you Johnathan?
http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Where's the JRE build then? It hasn't been available for the past 5 years. And you've kept it from being freely distributable so nobody can deploy except using gcj.

Jonathan Schwarz censors comments on his blog.

It's just Microsoft fingering wagging RedHat, and pushing for more Novell-like deals. Do you really think IBM and HP will let Microsoft ligate out their cash-cow Linux Server biz? Not even remotely likely. Hard to take it seriously, just a RedHat slam delivered via handpicked media outlets. I seriously doubt Microsoft, wants SCO Part 2. Plus they will have to revel their hands, in order for anyone to take them seriously, and then they could be in deeper trouble, if the supposed patents don't pass muster technically or legally. Just the usual FUD, Fortune let itself be a willing host.

@11, yes he does. I only ever got 1 comment through on his blog.
I wonder why they bother to advertise or make statements though?
The Sun hardware market is totally closed off to Telecom anyway. He's not really speaking to his core customers at all.
Would Scoble dump ubuntu on his cheap x86 server in his office for Sun? Would anybody?
Sun just isn't viable outside their core market unless you're using Java, Tomcat or Jboss for free on x platform. Yes, the contributed a lot to Linux.

Are you guys really shocked that his blog comments are moderated??? Wow.

You really expect him to let his blog be spammed by Chris like comments that never end about Sun and the Telecom industry that have nothing to do with the original blog post?

@14

It has everything to do with the Schwartz article posted.
"With business down and customers leaving"

Customers aren't leaving strictly because of FOSS or GPL. They're leaving because of the unbelievable price gap between Sun gear and the rest of the free world. That's the same reason people are leaving MS software and moving to Linux. Except there it's about redistribution.
$8000 for a SPARC desktop, ONE desktop. No big deal. Now if that's for a small business, multiply it by 25. NOW it's a big deal.

That's the problem. The equipment is made for another industry, and even the lighter stuff with the AMD processors are geared towards that. The RaQ and cobalt stuff they made a few years ago was crap, so they really need to rethink reaching those markets so they don't make the same mistakes.

BTW, ATTN: J. Schwartz, if you're reading this.

I'll give you $2000 for a new Netra 240 plus shipping, use my link & contact form, I'm good for it. I still like Sun hardware, but I would like to pay a fare price for it. Even with LOM and everything else it's just not worth it if you can't sell it at a fair price. The Sun pricing is not fair or in line with the rest of the market. 2k for a 240, name your price and save, hows about it?

Chris, what are you talking about? Your posts are way off topic. However, if you want a dual-processor Sun server, with LOM... perhaps you should go for a dual-processor X2200 for $1700...

Sounds like that's more in line with your budget.

The truth is: Sun can be a massively responsive company if you're reasonable (Jonathan Schwartz and his senior team really *do* care). Best of luck getting that kind of top-level commitment from HP or Dell or IBM; it just doesn't happen...

It's easy for those that are primarily hardware vendors to talk of innovating and not worrying about infringement. If a software company "innovates" or even just makes improvements on existing ideas, OSS devs clone it, give it away free, and laughingly stick their tongues out at the original creators. So millions of dollars are spend in R&D to create software features, and the original creators have nothing to show for it (were it not for patent protection).

The patent system needs reform, but for a hardware vendor to say that a software vendor should pay no mind to the OSS cloners is quite disingenuous.

Hell, look what happened to Borland wrt Eclipse. Eclipse copied entire features for Borland's IDEs, provided those features for free, and forced Borland out of the IDE biz altogether.

Sun advocates software be freely cloned because they don't produce any (that's designed to make money) that isn't tied to hardware. Of course, this is the same Sun that advocated that software be supplied as hardware appliances. Spreadsheet appliances, word processor appliances, etc. We tried word processor appliances in the early 80's - they sucked.

And where are the "innovations" that Sun speaks of? All Java does these days is copy C# in an attempt to catch up (and Java's versions of C# features are poor hacks; C#'s copies of Java features were improvments).

JavaFX is an attempt to catch up to Adobe.

And Sun does use litigation; they were one of the prime movers of the antitrust cases against MS. So Sun is full of it.

@Jayson & Pepper. Litigation in respect of abuse of monopoly power is different from companies deciding to sue their customers. The latter is what Steve Ballmer threatened to do this weekend.

I'm a Microsoft customer; I don't take kindly to being threatened...

@19
>JavaFX is an attempt to catch up to Adobe.

WPF/E (sorry, Silverlight) is an attempt to catch up to Adobe. The funny part is that we should believe it's seriously going to be cross platform! Yeah, sure ..

>All Java does these days is copy C# in an attempt to catch up

Ironic seeing how they carbon copied Java to make C#.

Features not coming up fast enough in Java? Wow, too bad there's a process for the community to participate and debate what issues should make it into the language. Must be nice to just add and delete whatever you feel on a whim. We'll see how this changes now that the platform is GPL. Oh no, GPL is bad, right?

@17, Maybe they are a little off, but I still think that's the heart of Sun's problem.

" perhaps you should go for a dual-processor X2200 for $1700…"

Why would I want to go buy an older model AMD that they sell on TigerDirect.com for $300
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x2200/specs.xml
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...

AMD sank their prices at the beginning of 2007 and Sun did not adjust their prices to reflect that at all. As if people are just going to overlook that.

For $1700 I could get a dual quad core for a couple hundred more:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT...

That's 8 cores in SMP.

Basically Sun is just offering AMD in a Sun case with the nicer fans and the LOM rom system.
The Netra T-4 I had was a 64 bit SPARC with 8MB cache per CPU, and it had 2 of them.

I offered J. Schwartz if he wants, to buy 1 or 2 of them for $2000 a piece. Not the cheap AMD model with the older CPU, but the Netra T4 240. If he wants to quietly take the offer up, he can contact me directly.

Hell, someone tell me how Sun justifies $30K for a NAS head?

@ John #23 - I agree. I don't think they *can* justify the storage pricing. That's why no-one is buying storage from Sun.

They really should be do something about their storage offerings - the whole Solaris stack should be letting Sun transform the storage market. People are actually building their own amazing, feature-rich, low-cost storage devices by using Open Solaris (NAS, iSCSI etc) and off-the-shelf components. I have no idea at all why Sun isn't.

While I have nothing against Sun, they have become an "also ran" company much like MS. The difference? Sun is not crying about it as much. Sun makes good hardware, albeit overly expensive for what it is. Commodity x86 servers I can buy or build myself work just as well for most things.

MS knows for a fact it is in deep doo-doo as far as relevancy goes. They are crying about it like a little kid who had their toys taken away. Jonathon Swartz is right when he says open source is unstoppable. MS needs to admit it is just another company now, not the top dog. Within the next ten years (probably sooner), Linux and free software will be dominant. Nothing wrong with this.

Look at history. All empires fall after a while, and MS has had a long reign at the throne. It's time for a new sheriff in town. An egalitarian, open license, free (both senses of the word) sheriff that caters to the people, not his own pocket and that of the shareholders.

TO throw out an oft-used Slashdot qoute, I for one welcome our new open source/free license overlords.

@25

"Sun makes good hardware, albeit overly expensive for what it is."

Why can't Sun just charge what it's worth. Some people think Apple is bad. I could buy a whole bunch of G5 and Mac pros before I would ever think of buying a new Netra 240.

It's ridiculous. At some point you have to realize that they won't because it will throw the telecom sales off, and give up wanting to use Sun gear.

@26,

I've worked with Sun hardware for years, and I'm telling you that it's overpriced for what you get. I've seen servers for far less outperform more expensive Sun hardware running Linux of FreeBSD.

Yes, it's good hardware, but it's not the panacea the telcos think it is. Why spend the money when you can do just as well for far, far less.

A lot of server performance has to do with the OS and how well it handles the hardware layer. FreeBSD is the superb player in this niche. FreeBSD will always outperform Solaris with RAM, etc., all being equal.

I despise paying exorbitant license fees when I can get better for free. Ask any Unix admin who knows his Unix and he will tell you that nothing on this planet beats FreeBSD or in the event of sever SMB needs, NetBSD.

In any event, companies are leaving Sun in droves anyway and setting up grid computing on commodity servers. I see it all the time.

Hey Chris - you're a bloody loon with an obsessive compulsive disorder. Get off it, already, a Niagara box from Sun outperforms a Tiger whitebox about 5 to 1, and if it breaks your web site, you have a prayer of getting it fixed instead of getting the finger. Get a life, fella, you need a friend that makes you go for walks outside in the sunshine. Give it up...

Someday soon the GOOG Borg will assimilate SUNW. Resistance is futile. MSFT is next.