
Red Hat set to surpass Sun in market capitalization - peter123
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10146879-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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peter123
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.

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gaius
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.

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wmf
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.

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gaius
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.

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wmf
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.

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byrneseyeview
"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.

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

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gaius
IBM already spend more on Java than Sun do.

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

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SwellJoe
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.

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gaius
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.

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wmf
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.

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SwellJoe
By some definition of "modern".

