Free Software Linux

When Sun announced at the beginning of this year that it was buying MySQL for the not inconsiderable sum of a billion dollars, the question most people posed to themselves was how Sun was going to recoup its investment. I was initially worried that Sun might try to push Solaris over GNU/Linux in the LAMP stack, but Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz was adamant that wasn't going to happen. Now, nearly a year later, we're beginning to see what exactly Sun has in mind....On Open Enterprise blog.

After evaluating Microsoft's cloud offering and Windows Azure, I was curious to know what network.com running Sun Grid will look like. The current goal is to make it suitable for building background tasks that present no web UI, but within that constraint, it's remarkably flexible. Theoretically any program capable of running on Solaris 10 for X64 (AMD or Intel CPU) can become a Sun Grid application! There are of course some constraints:

It's taken a long time, but I think finally we can see what the ideal home page for a software vendor should look like:

• it would list all the company's major products in a simple compact layout
• within two clicks you could get to a video walkthrough, some real information, or a download
• it would use colour, whitespace and layout to focus attention on the most important aspects of the page
• and just maybe it would have some aesthetic qualities - consistency, clarity and a sense of style

That site is sun.com.Main menu:

Accessibility rarely figures in the headlines – unless there's some competitive angle, as there was with ODF's supposed lack of accessibility features that Microsoft was quick to trumpet. Against that background, it's good to hear of a thoroughgoing project to improve accessibility, like this one, announced by Sun's Peter Korn....On Open Enterprise blog.

When Sun released Solaris to the open source community in the form of OpenSolaris, would anyone have guessed that it would soon wind up running on IBM System z mainframes? Amazingly, that milestone has now been achieved.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Flash, but there's no denying an open version would at least be better than a closed one. Here's why that's not happening:

Interesting article on the last ditch efforts of Sun to keep Solaris from dying. Personally, I think Solaris will die a similar death as IBM’s OS/2 did - slowly, with stalwarts hanging on as long as they can. http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html I’m not sure UNIX in general is dead as AIX and I think even HP-UX have seen fairly strong growth recently, but Linux is certainly tearing up the industry like the good disruptor it is. I think another angle that was missed is the outstanding growth of Linux on Power and mainframe platforms - heck, even Sun has tried to put Solaris on an IBM mainframe.

A recent thread on the lkml discussed a blog entry stating that minimal ZFS support for GRUB was available under the GPL license, "we could now use that code to implement support for ZFS in the Linux kernel." Alan Cox explained, "no we can't. The GPL ZFS bits don't include the various methods that would violate the patent so there is no grant. I've several times asked Sun to simply give permission and they don't even answer. I can only read the Sun motivation one way - they want to look open but know that ZFS is about the only thing that might save Solaris as a product in the data centre so are not truly prepared to let Linus use it." H. Peter Anvin added, "from what I can see, it is an absolutely-minimal read only implementation."

Has mismanagement finally done Sun in? Unfortunately I have to wonder if Jonathan has done irreparable damage. I think a lack of a real strategy to embrace Linux has led to this problem… Schwartz tried to turn Sun into an “open source company” but what does that really mean? How many companies have taken a similar approach and generated shareholder value? The best “open source companies” know better, they know how to manage and really use open source effectively to support their strategy - they don’t make it the strategy.

Pamela Jones of Groklaw rightly takes umbrage that Sun Microsystems apparently stood by while The SCO Group attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. Jones writes:

At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.

One of the entries in the launchpad competition today was Sun Microsystem’s Project SocialSite. It’s part of the larger Glassfish project, and uses Apache Shindig as an OpenSocial container - they demo’d OpenSocial widgets running inside Drupal and MediaWiki - all running inside a Java Application Server. Video:

I thought it would be fun to look at Chris Sontag's testimony as a whole, instead of just covering the SCO v. Novell trial according to the particular day. Sontag was called by Novell on the first day, April 29, 2008. They didn't finish so he was back on the stand on the 30th, so I've cobbled together the relevant sections from the two day's transcripts to show you the complete performance.

You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.

An analysis with a top lawyer suggests that Moonlight is to be avoided