[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <memo.20240107190811.16260s at jgd.cix.co.uk>,
John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <unehno$14f82$1 at dont-email.me>, arne at vajhoej.dk (Arne Vajhøj)
>wrote:
>
>> Sun had a problem:
>> - Solaris/SPARC servers were more expensive than Linux/x86-64 
>>   servers
>> - the applications running on Solaris/SPARC were typically not that
>>   difficult to port to Linux
>> 
>> Asking for a premium without sufficient vendor lock-in is a bad
>> business case.
>
>Their responses were also not that great: 
>
>They open-sourced their OS in the belief that this would "reduce
>development costs" as Linux people switched to working on Solaris. This
>didn't happen to any noticeable extent. The open-sourcing part created
>lots of work for expensive lawyers and slowed software development. 

I know many of the players involved with the creation of
OpenSolaris and I think they would dispute parts of this.

It is true that the hoped-for shift of open source people
working on Linux and BSD moving to working on OpenSolaris did
not materialize.  But why?

I believe that, within OpenSolaris, the feeling was that Solaris
was "so obviously better" that people would just naturally
gravitate to the technically superior offering.  However, by
this time, Linux was "good enough" and improving rapidly;
certainly at a pace greater than Solaris was improving.  So
while there were parts of Solaris that were (and arguably still
are) technically superior to Linux, the feeling was that Linux
would overtake Sun in these areas soon anyway, so why switch?
Secondly, a lot of people were put off by the CDDL; Linux seemed
safer and more "free."  Moreover, some parts of the operating
system remained closed, and you pretty much had to use SunPro
(at last at the beginning) to build things, and that was still
proprietary.

That said, while the initial open-sourcing was expensive, it is
not clear to me that the ongoing cost was particularly high.
Certainly, I have _never_ heard anyone who worked on it complain
about the ongoing cost.  Re-closing the source code was highly
contentious.

I think the reason OpenSolaris failed was that it was just too
little, too late.  There wasn't a good reason for people to
switch.

>Cut back their hardware development, since it was expensive, making their
>systems even less competitive. 

Yes.  They really missed the boat on x86.

>They ended up selling themselves to Oracle, of course. Oracle's plan was
>vertical integration: tuning up SPARC and Solaris hardware for Oracle
>database so they had a price-performance advantage on their own hardware.
>A great plan, except that the tuning had already been done and there was
>no unrealised performance available. 

Well, when the main reason your systems are sold is to run one
program specifically....

It's a shame.

	- Dan C.