windows on sun?

[WildTangent]

article link (http://www.betanews.com/article/Windows_May_Come_to_Sun_Servers/1120583257)

very odd idea if you ask me...but the way i see it, it wont damage sun much, if anything itll increase their profits, they already give away their OS (but charge for support mind you)

-Wild

[WildTangent]

<bump>
sorry, i hate when i post something and only a few people see it

-Wild

[bgstratt]

nah, we saw it Wild, just didn't want to respond, LMAO, J/K,

It does make some sense for Sun to offer Windows as well as their own OS, all costs are passed on to the consumer, hence the consumer has the choice to pay more for windows, or utilize their own tech support, or one of Sun's partners. I think it just shows that unlike some other companies or corporations, Sun is willing to give people a choice, giving choices is always a good thing. Some people may say that too many choices are a bad thing, but it's not that at all, giving too many uninformed choices is a bad thing, as long as you are informed there is not such thing as too many choices, like too many linux distro's, no such thing, because each one is tailored for a different purpose or person, luckily we have some great sites on the web to inform us about them, although some are a little biased, as well they should be, towards our beloved Ubuntu. On another note, anybody ever seen an unbiased TCO Report, just kidding, don't answer that.

[KiwiNZ]

Sun + Windows .......Why?:???::-\"

[az]

Okay, sun has three things

1- Java.
2- Sun hardware(which has been 64 bit for quite a long time)
3- Solaris

(4)- It also sponsors the OpenOffice project. It is a free project, so you cannot say that they own it.

They are in the process of opening solaris (its' license is not GPL compatible (surprise!) but it is considered free) They still have a number of paying Solaris customers, though.

I suppose that since Sun has no idea of what open source software is, and to be consistent in their inconsistencies, they are looking of a backup plan for when they screw up Solaris for their customers.

That way, there will still be something proprietary available to run on their hardware.


...Just my opinion.

[bgstratt]

azz, I think you may be under-estimating Sun, already, and for quite some time now, many of the US military's key computer systems run on, you guessed it, Sun Solaris, from missile warning to god only knows what else, Sun has monetary support for it's products, they don't need to advertise, heck they don't even have to sell to anybody else and they'll still be rolling, but to continue to be competitive, and to ensure they have all the choices a customer could possibly want, just puts them another notch up in the money game

[az]

I am not saying that Sun is incompetent and is mis-managed. They are a big company that has probably a few people who know about open source, but they cannot bring themselves to embrace it completely.

You cannot have it both ways, and I forsee their open source endeavours failing because they are not leaving enough for the community (in their openness). It is frustrating to observe because they are a big and successful company and it would be a blow to the good name of Free and Open Source software for Sun to (wrongly) claim that they gave it a shot and it does not work.

[psoleko]

Sun is a changing company, just like IBM has been for past few years. It's a trend in the industry towards providing "solutions", and the key is being able to offer what your competitor offers better and cheaper. Sun sold only Sparc boxes for many years, today you will find there server line populated with AMD Opterons running Solaris or *gasp* Redhat. It's an interesting little evolution to watch Sun undergoing, wouldn't be surprised if they end up very similar to IBM in the end. Just my .02.

[WirelessMike]

Hey-- Don't leave out the telecommunications industry. The backbone of telecommunications has, for several years now, run almost entirely on Sun. Like you said, though, there is a change happening. It's happening at the telecom I work for and at several others. It's a slow transition towards open-source alternatives, typically vendor-proprietary flavors of Red Hat Enterprise and MySQL.

Even the huge national database for number portability in the US has just transitioned this year from Sun and Oracle to Linux and MySQL. I don't know what flavor of Linux-- All Neustar will say is that it is Linux. That's a government-regulated and subsidized national database that tells all telecoms how to properly route calls to people who ported their numbers to another provider. In other words-- That's a really big deal.

Also-- Believe it or not, Staroffice (http://globalspecials.sun.com/dr/v2/ec_Main.Entry17c?V1=705170&PID=705170&PN=1&SP=10023&SID=50285&CUR=840&CID=190073&API1=65&API2=GOOGLE&API3=staroffice_exa&DSP=&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=190073) is still a proprietary product from Sun. Openoffice is sort of a beta version of it without the full suite of available apps. Although I'm not really sure which one develops the other. I assume Openoffice, because it is open source and extremely dynamic dictates the evolution of Staroffice. Is this right?

I think the rest of this year and next will either see Sun completely redefined or completely obsolete. The former being much more realistic than the latter.