[TriLUG] Sun is developing a new LINUX desktop!!

[al johson]

The following message was forwarded to me by a close friend who naturally is
a Mac OSX enthusiast. The original article's author and source are also
included if you care to read further.---Al Johnson.
============================

Original Mac hand leads Sun desktop charge
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 09/11/2002 at 03:32 GMT

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice
again.

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
- Lewis Carroll

Sun's Desktop strategy - "Project Madhatter" - is taking shape and it
dominated questions from the floor at an analyst session in San
Francisco today. In charge of Madhatter is Curtis Sasaki - Sun's VP of
Desktop Software - who was at Apple at the launch of the original
Macintosh in 1984, led the IIGS project and then followed Steve Jobs to
NeXT where he spent several years. More from Curtis in a moment.

Madhatter actually arrived in September: a small and sensible
announcement, but one concealed beneath billowing clouds of gwana gwana
so thick that both SFO and Oakland airports were closed briefly, as
landing was considered too dangerous.

Sun simply said it will do a Linux desktop, and sell it in bundles of
100 or so. It will only target certain markets "transaction workers" -
public and education and call center or retail staff, and it isn't at
all a consumer ploy. Very prudent, we noted, as diving into a full on
desktop war with The Beast has been many a man's folly: Ray Noorda,
Mike Cowpland are two.

Jonathan Schwartz thinks Sun will be the first company to present a
deployable Linux desktop with all the trimmings - the management
software, applications (iPlanet) and the channel - to Fortune 500
customers. Since no one else of Sun's size is trying to do this, and
IBM and Hewlett Packard are Windows licensees and are doing Linux
everywhere except on the desktop, he's probably right. At least on this
scale.

Microsoft "threatened to sue" own customers
He had a few zingers to hand.

Microsoft - and this is an amazing claim - had threatened to sue its
own customers if they used GPL software. Really?

"I've spoken to general counsels of corporations who've been told that
their business critical information systems will be released to the
public if they use open source." That's the GPL as virus/cancer line
Microsoft had been taking in public, and now realizes is a terrible
mistake. If anyone can corroborate this we'd like to know: and there's
a logical fallacy which may be Microsoft's or it might be Jonathan's,
because the two don't necessarily follow.

Schwartz had also "heard" that HP wouldn't buy BEA "because Microsoft
wouldn't like it." Since being bought by HP is the kiss of death for
any decent middleware company, they probably would like it, but that's
enough innuendo.

He was on firmer ground - and it's something most of us can corroborate
to some extent - with his claim that Microsoft's enormous profits are
causing great resentment amongst IS managers. Bumping up prices in a
recession at every one else's expense is not going to be popular - but
only Sun is at liberty to make this point. (That doesn't mean you
should stop sending us corroboration, thank you).

So the MadHatter "stack" will be GNOME, Evolution and StarOffice (plus
Java and MetaFrame or Tarantella if need be). In addition to the N1
provisioning software for server deployments (details in 30 to 60 days
said Schwartz), there'll be management software to ease patching and
upgrades.

Curtis reminded us later that Helix [now Ximian]- whose Red Carpet
software does this job - is a partner. "We pay them to do stuff," he
said. He said Sun's Linux management software is 'Blue Ink', a new code
name to us. [But probably BlueLink - Cobalt's update software].

When I asked Schwartz if customers wouldn't just be trading in one TCO
hairball for another - Linux fixes still require plenty of management -
he told us the Sun Ray was an excellent solution. Now I'm not at my
best in the mornings ever, but even I could tell that was an answer to
a different question. We later learnt that some mobile workers will
need to work offline, but since the software
(Evolution/StarOffice/GNOME) will be the same across Solaris and Linux,
it doesn't matter. Sun knows how to look after stuff in the cloud,
which is where it belongs. Fair enough.

Curtis described Red Hat's management software as proprietary and that
required organizations to step outside the firewall, and Sun's wouldn't
do this. They're partners, with Sun's first Linux essentially being Red
Hat Advanced Server rebadged, but this is direct competition.

OpenSolaris?
Schwartz even suggested that Solaris might become LSB-compliant. We'll
run this past some of our Solaris sysadmin friends for a reaction. With
so many happy Sun customers chugging away on Solaris 2.x or even SunOS
the prospect of change might cause some consternation. On the other
hand, most of these sysadmins run Linux anyway for fun, so it could
equally be welcomed. Such exercises are like iffy wigs: I'm old enough
to remember DEC rebranding VMS as OpenVMS in a wheezing attempt to look
cool and hep, just like the new Open Systems boys. DEC added a POSIX
layer that no one ever used anyway, but the name stuck.

One reader this evening had this to say about the move:- "This is like
taking a pure breed dog and intentionally cross breeding with a mutt.
Solaris has a solid SYSV heritage, and SunOS was as true to BSD as
anything. Why they would mate it to a demonic half breed like Linux is
beyond me," he writes. "Why? Because every thing is where it is
supposed to be, things like system calls and arguments dont randomly
change."

NeXT stop
Curtis has had some of the most interesting jobs in the Valley -
between NeXT and Sun he was at General Magic. Which popularized the
term "communicator" even before Nokia did (they launched theirs in
1996).

What did he learn from General Magic?

"That it's hard to work with consumer electronics companies!" he said.
"They're very demanding."

Naturally he was a Mac OS X user, it's more fun than XP any day he
reckoned, and had some nice details of the early Apple days, which we
now remember we promised not to use.

The vexed subject of StarOffice came up, and Sun people always ask me
why I have such a downer on it. I reply that it's a really good thing,
it gives people lots of choice, it supports lots of languages including
Thai, Arabic and Hebrew, and that's usually enough to avoid sharing my
subjective opinion: which is that I'd rather be scarred with red hot
pokers than have to use such an ugly piece of software. It's so slow.
So random - so un Sun-like.
(Even Sun's flops - like the NeWS printer we affectionately mock now
and again - have a point. [NeWS remembered here])

Using an Office suite is like cross-dressing: I guess some people have
a need to do it, but it's possible to get through life without actually
having done it yourself. And in any case, this is something Microsoft
does better. Or used to, when it still listened to its users.

There are lots of open source software suites - I mentioned Gobe,
Curtis mentioned KOffice - but he said most weren't mature enough to
cut the mustard.

Curtis had been to China, and said it had a huge potential for Linux,
and PRC government representatives were genuinely committed to building
an open source infrastructure. (Or getting cheap stuff, I thought)

Weren't all the ventures party-owned? Not at all, he said - they were
really thinking like capitalists.

Not too long ago unproductive workers in one of the first manufacturing
plants would be thrown down a ravine, pour les encouragement des
autres. That practice has stopped, we now believe. Which is a good
thing if they're going to be equipped with StarOffice.

"Comrade Lee! I see your output of spreadsheets has been very low this
morning!"

"No, no! It is not my fault, but the fault of the Sun Starmicrosystems
software!" - sound of hard disk thrashing away - "I'm still trying to
get the first one loaded."

Well, there's a motivator. ®