What exactly is Sun Microsystems up to? Has this one-time market giant lost its way or does it have a slowly developing (and largely open source) comeback plan up its sleeve?
With each new announcement made over the past six months, the company seems to be moving closer and closer to an open source future, and some might suggest, somewhat cynically, that plunging profits and share prices may well be the motive behind this attraction for open source, and largely free, software. What is certain is that this one-time giant is indeed struggling against the tide (its share price is down to a year low of around $5 this week against last year`s August high of $18) and in desperate need of a new lease on life. But is open source the way to go?
What is Sun, a maker of high-priced heavy iron servers, doing with an entry-level server that runs Linux and is all but maintenance-free?
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
While not the first flirtation with open source, the current attraction for the operating system started late last year when CDE, the Solaris graphical interface, was rather unceremoniously pushed aside in favour of one of the newest upstarts in this market, Gnome.
Gnome, a wholly open source desktop environment very closely tied to the GNU movement, is one of the leading lights when it comes to Linux, or in fact most varieties of Unix, on the desktop.
Then, in a series of announcements in May, Sun released StarOffice 6.0, the latest generation of the office suite the company acquired a few years ago, and issued a few press releases on behalf of OpenOffice.org, the open source and free version of the self-same suite. In fact, the company goes so far as to make it obvious that there are barely any differences between the two pieces of software.
Next comes the Cobalt Qube, a low-profile and brightly coloured low-end server that runs Linux rather than Sun`s own version of Unix. Not only is this peculiar, but the machine also includes, pre-installed, everything from a database to a Web server, all of which are open source standards, such as Apache and MySQL.
And just a few days ago, the company announced plans to release its Web services application server for free in an effort to establish it among the developer community and, no doubt, undermine Microsoft`s .Net strategy.
Addressing the issues
There are two issues here. The first is the hardware side. What is Sun, a maker of high-priced heavy iron servers, doing with an entry-level server that runs Linux and is all but maintenance-free? As nice as the Qube is, another brightly coloured low-end server is not going to save Sun from the doldrums, especially not if it runs Linux and is virtually maintenance-free. This is almost consumer market stuff that Sun is not exactly good at.
The second, and more interesting area, is that of software, and there may be some method in Sun`s madness. For a start, Gnome is a killer desktop environment, and outwits and outweighs CDE every time in my opinion. Getting into the "Gnome way" may well be one of the wisest decisions the company could have made with the result that it gets a fully matured desktop environment with relatively little overhead thanks to the ongoing development work being done by the open source community.
And as far as StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are concerned, I wouldn`t be surprised by suggestions that the company has been sitting on the suite and waiting for the optimum time to introduce its latest offering to the world. I say this because the suite has been released into a market in which users are starting to feel the pinch of Microsoft`s licensing changes. While just a few months ago the grumbles about Microsoft were nothing more than that because users had no better alternative, the release of StarOffice 6.0 has changed all of that, and now daily I hear of individuals and companies either using StarOffice to replace their existing office suite or planning the move in the near future.
And to release the application server for free is just plain smart. Web services have suddenly become the movement of the moment, and now is the time to grab market share.
I`m not really sure where Sun is going with all of this, but I do suspect that there may be some sense in its seemingly haphazard strategy. Not everything makes sense, and I still don` t get the Qube, but as far as software goes, Sun may well be heading in the right direction. Now let`s hope that some of the momentum and benefits rub off on the open source community.
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