[nycbug-talk] Sun News Roundup

[Raj Goel]

Please don't insult dung-flinging monkeys in a dancing show -- they have 
some use in the universe.

Sun's marketing/branding team otoh, has no real purpose, except to 
generate negative revenues.

And Sun sales' incompetency can leave very little to be desired -- I've 
found it easier/faster to buy from the Sun/eBay team, then from Sun sales.

If we could combine Apple's marketing, Sun's hardware + Solaris, and 
Google's halo of "trust us, we're not evil..."

THAT would be  a lethal combination.

-- Raj

Rajesh Goel, CISSP
cell (917) 685-7731
CTO: Brainlink International, Inc.
"IT Management and Solutions"

Miles Nordin wrote:
>>>>>> "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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