[nycbug-talk] Sun News Roundup

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "ak" == Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> writes:

    ak> For the Sun that move would be as wise as Yahoo to agree to
    ak> Microsoft proposal...

lolz, yeah.

but...for example, Sun has an ``enterprise mail'' package.  it's huge,
like Zimbra-huge, highly scalable, had Ajax-y stuff even in the
ancient 2005 release I'm still using.  Nobody seems to know about it.
They talk about Zimbra, Scalix, imp/horde/kolab, but not the Sun
package.  why?

well there are a few possible answers.  maybe it's too ``hard to
install'' (wtf?!), or no one is interested in a package where you get
``some'' of the source code---if we're ditching Exchange then we want
ALL source under a reasonable license.  And we want the source for the
goddamn stable version which we are actually _running_ in production,
we do not want some whacked out source for an unpatchable flakey
development version which you call the ``community'' version.  All
three under Sun's control, and their so-called open-source stuff I've
dug into (Solaris, Javur) seems to make the second two mistakes.

Have you heard about their frankengcc?  It's neat, and I plan to use
it.  I also find it HIGHLY offensive, though I guess people who use
*BSD are required to swear loyalty to the BSD license instead of GPL
so you will probably not be offended, but at least you can still
understand, the software Sun has co-opted here is GPL software, so the
authors of the software would probably be offended, and even as BSD
advocates you may agree far enough to empathize for how the author's
intent was frustrated by Sun's sneaky pedantic manoevering:

 http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/

But, I don't think that's why people haven't heard of the Sun mail
package.  I think there is only one real reason.


It's because no one knows what it's *CALLED*!  I cannot even tell you.
And if I tried, someone would disagree with me and say, ``no no
actually that name refers to Sun's <blah blah blah>.''  Their brokeass
monkey-marketing department keeps renaming it, and combining and
uncombining it with other products like some little dancing-feces
puppet show.  Sun also has a nameless portal/wiki/CMS package which
has at least three different names so you go blind trying to figure
out what is inside it and what you're downloading.

 http://blogs.sun.com/portal/resource/websynergy-release-2.png

I HOPE THE DIAGRAM MAKES EVERYTHING CLEAR.  Even OpenSolaris itself,
something even more vile and confusing than a rename has
happened---they took the existing name and REPOINTED it at something
completely different, in such an arcane way that I would have to give
a 5-year Sun history lesson to explain the details of the change and
why they are significant and mess up everyone's conversations.  It's
like some Orwellian newspeak.

If IBM bought them and reduced redundancies by firing their entire
marketing department, then immediately sold them to Radio Shack or
something, that'd be a tremendous improvement in their chances for
survival.

But yeah, the brilliant work of fresh college grads that made Sun
great in the old days has already been largely squished by this new
regime that insists on pandering to idiot Bank sysadmins, and it
smells liek there's this growing culture of laziness-as-a-virtue
festering in there---like, the Tier 1 phonemonkeys in the call center
seem to be running the entire company, bossing around the developers
to the point they live in fear and create these assertion-riddled
Fisher Price interfaces with binary config files, because they don't
want anything that'll be a ``call generator''.  or, maybe the Tier 1
techs are in fact taking orders from the lunchladies in the cafeteria.
It's structured as one of these ``bottom up'' companies, you know,
because that's how you incubate bold new ideas.

I sort of wish Google would buy them and turn them Evil.  At least
they'd get more work done.

``Following our assimi^Waquisition of Sun, there will be no further
releases of Solaris.  The community is welcome to fork the CDDL bits.
Good luck re-implementing the binary parts (hint: start with the C
compiler, then move on to scsi_vhci.  oh did we stop giving you X
source at some point?  <shrug> 's our right.).  The good news is, we
will be deploying the new private version throguhout our hosted Cloud,
and you can use as much Solaris CPU as you like on our machines for
free!  free, as in $0!  isn't that fantastic?  you're free!  so long
as you sign this simple agreement!  All the GPL tools are there, too,
with our improvements.  However since we are not actually releasing
any longer, just hosting, you will not get source for them, so
sorry about that and welcome to the Future!''
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