Red Hat set to surpass Sun in market capitalization | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat set to surpass Sun in market capitalization

news.cnet.com

12 pointspeter12322 comments

Sun failed miserably in embracing Linux and cloud computing (as a service). They hung on to their old business that was getting commoditized rapidly, plus having huge dependencies on Wall St. customers didn't help.

I agree...but, now what about Schwartz time at the helm? The past couple of years, I think, have set a pretty interesting new course for Sun. The acquisition of MySQL is merely the most obvious example, but Sun has open sourced everything in their software stable. Literally all of Sun is Open Source now (hell, they even have an open CPU design or two). This has beaten down their revenues a bit (OK, maybe a lot) in the short term...but I wonder if it's the beginning of a dramatic turnaround. It feels kinda like they've put the nerds back in charge. I don't know if that's always a good thing. Would Apple have become what it is today if Woz had been at the helm? It's almost comically obvious that it wouldn't be...but still, Sun was founded by nerds for nerds, and was explosively successful because of that.

In other words, I have no idea what's going to happen to Sun. But, I like them better as a company under Schwartz than at any time in the past ten of fifteen years.

'Literally all of Sun is Open Source now...this has beaten down their revenues a bit (OK, maybe a lot) in the short term.'

Why do you think that? All the Solaris (most of Sun's revenue) Sun's former customers actually use is Solaris, not OpenSolaris. No Sun customers I know would go without a support plan if they use Sun's OSS work. Right now they already pay Red Hat for their support plans.

Why do you think that?

Because Schwartz as much as said so at a conference last year. Maybe I misinterpret the remark, but it was something along the lines of, "I've caught some flak for our Open Source strategy from Wall Street and some of our institutional investors, but I believe that long-term this is the only viable option for Sun." I took this to mean he believes, and that some investors believe, that in the short term, going all Open Source is a net negative for their revenue.

I think the investors are failing to understand that none of Sun's customers want to use anything without a support agreement.

I am pretty sure you could rent time on a Sun cloud long before there was EC2 or AppEngine. They were doing $1/CPU/hour back in '04. Except they called it a "grid", not a cloud.

Yes, but then they basically never improved it. Hardware got dramatically cheaper, but Sun didn't drop prices AFAIK. People started wanting to run Web servers and databases in the cloud, but Sun did nothing. Now they are racing to catch up by productizing Caroline and Q-Layer.

It's true they are focussed on compute, but it's also true that EC2 and AppEngine are not. I'm not entirely sure how you'd, for example run an FEA or CFD job on AppEngine.

I've heard that MPI works (granted, at 1Gbps speed) on EC2 and it's only $0.20/core/hour. When EC2 is cheaper and strictly more flexible than Sun Grid, it's hard to argue why Sun Grid exists at all. Maybe that's why Sun shut it down.

Sun could've been EC2++ 2 yrs before Amazon even has a clue.

I remember when Sun announced this. I don't know if it was ever open to walk-up credit-card customers, like EC2.

The price was absurd even then. But further, you had to purchase exact blocks of time in advance. And if you bought 12 hours, but then only needed 2, tough cookies.

"Set to surpass"? Market value is based on stock price, and stock price is, by definition, the point at which there is as much demand for buying a stock as for selling it. So it sounds like Cnet doesn't have an actual story until Red Hat goes up, or Sun goes down. They're just pushing a fairly cheesy, meaningless non-story to get in ahead of whoever is planning on writing the slightly less meaningless non-story about when Red Hat's market cap does surpass Sun's.

What would happen to Java when/if Sun becomes bankrupt or irrelevant?

IBM already spend more on Java than Sun do.

Sad; It seems the best product is not always who wins.

I don't understand your meaning. Linux is a very fine operating system, and for many purposes (like desktops and small servers) it is vastly superior to Solaris. Red Hat has some of the most productive and important Linux kernel developers (along with dozens of other developers working on Gnome, databases, and a lot more) on their payroll, so they're definitely involved in the making.

Solaris is so embarrassingly bad in a few areas that I get pretty angry every time I have to use it. It makes it even worse when I use the stuff that Sun has done really well (ZFS, Zones, dtrace), that I then have to use their stupidly bad package management tools, their neanderthal old UNIX utilities (or install the GNU tools myself, and remember to use the g variants), and their general disdain for anything not invented by Sun.

Red Hat have a luxury Sun have denied themselves: breaking stuff between versions. Do you know they won't support you if you upgrade RHEL4 to 5 in-place? They want you to start again from the bare metal. Sun hang onto the legacy stuff because they guarantee nothing will break when you upgrade.

Now fair enough, maybe that's not so important in a world where you have a "cloud" of a thousand identical machines that you just build from gold master images and throw away when they break, but Solaris is not like it is because Sun doesn't know how to get new versions of their userland. Rather, they've chosen not to.

Sun finally fixed this problem by forking. Solaris will remain crufty and backwards compatible until the beginning of time. OpenSolaris supposedly threw out all the cruft and has modern userland.

By some definition of "modern".

Red Hat have a luxury Sun have denied themselves: breaking stuff between versions.

Between major versions. RHEL4 is still supported, and will be for several more years, and never breaks compatibility. RHEL has a seven year security update cycle (and a five year full support life cycle). It's not Solaris style backwards compatibility, but it's more than long enough for any server I've ever managed. The average server life in the web services business is right at three years. That leaves four years of wiggle room.

Sun has occasional done major breaks in the past. Not as frequently as Red Hat, but I have dealt with issues in the past.

Do you know they won't support you if you upgrade RHEL4 to 5 in-place?

I actually didn't know that. I've done such upgrades numerous times (hundreds, at least) in the past and never had any problems. On the other hand, I've attempted Solaris upgrades in-place, and been damn near beaten to death by the machine in the process. I think I'd prefer to not have support and have it work, than to have support and need a helluva lot of it.

Solaris is not like it is because Sun doesn't know how to get new versions of their userland. Rather, they've chosen not to.

Yes, I know. That's why it's so damned frustrating. Sun has smart people working for them. They could be building a leading edge operating system, but they aren't. They're building an operating system that would have been embarrassing for a Linux distribution ten years ago. Package management has been a solved problem for years...and yet, Sun still ships a retarded bunch of crusty old pkg tools and they recently added a clunky GUI to sit on top of it so they can pretend they've improved their package manager. No matter how good a few pieces of the tech are, or how good backward compatibility is, if the user experience sucks, I'm not going to use it for the majority of my systems. And, right now, the user experience on Solaris sucks. Really, deeply, truly, and with enthusiasm, sucks. I figured Ian Murdock being on board would at least get package management fixed (since Debian was the first Linux distro to have reasonably modern package management in apt-get), but that hasn't happened.

I guess we'll see if OpenSolaris can solve these problems...but, we're, what, two or three years into the OpenSolaris experiment, and you still can't just download an installable CD for the damned thing. You have to run it in a VirtualBox, or jump through really complex hoops and be extremely selective about hardware.

Sorry, I actually jumped into the conversation to say nice things about Sun. But, you dragged me back through my years of dealing with Solaris boxes, and trying to support OpenSolaris and Solaris in our products, and it brought out Angry Joe.

'Red Hat have a luxury Sun have denied themselves: breaking stuff between versions.'

No longer true since RHEL 4 was released about four years ago.

They didn't support it for 2.1 -> RHEL 3. http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-4082

Now they support it since RHEL 3-> RHEL 4. It's still not the recommended option. http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-7946

Of course not. You are forgetting price. Nobody would claim a Honda Accord is better than a BMW M6 but you can bet the former sells more.

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