Posted on 11/15/2004 9:29:24 AM PST by crushelits
SAN JOSE, Calif. - After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software — free.
Sun, which has never completely rebounded from the tech collapse in 2001, hopes the no-cost of Solaris 10 will not only attract customers but also expand the number of developers who write programs that work on computers running the operating system.
The result, Sun believes, will be renewed demand for its servers and services. The company also will charge subscription fees for Solaris support and service programs that are typically sought by the businesses and organizations that Sun targets.
"Hewlett Packard sells a printer at a low price and makes a lot of money on printer cartridges. Gillette gives you the razor and makes a lot of money on the blades," said Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive. "There are different ways to drive market penetration."
Solaris 10 will be unveiled Monday at an event in San Jose, though it won't be formally released until the end of January. It will work on more than 270 computer platforms running on chips from Sun, Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The price of earlier versions of Solaris typically ran between hundreds and thousands of dollars — depending on the system that was being run by the software, said Tom Goguen, Sun's vice president of operating platforms.
Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released. With access to the code, Solaris users will be able to take advantage of its features when developing their own software and systems.
The move stands in contrast to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and other proprietary operating systems in which the blueprints are released only to select outsiders, if any.
And, depending on the final license, it could make Solaris more competitive with open-source operating systems like Linux (news - web sites) and distributors such as Red Hat Inc.
"When we open source, the one advantage we thought Red Hat had is gone. Then we both have an advantage with respect to Microsoft," McNealy said. "(Sun has) a worldwide service and support organization, which we think is way better than either company in the enterprise."
Solaris also will run programs written for the Linux operating system without having to make any changes.
Though Sun also sells lower-end systems that run Linux, it believes Solaris is a better value proposition. To strengthen its case, Solaris 10 will include security features that in the past were only part of a trusted version sold strictly to government agencies and the military.
Sun, a star of the late 1990s tech boom, fell on hard times as corporate spending shrunk and rivals like IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. started offering machines with less expensive hardware and software.
The Santa Clara-based company has been trying to return to solid footing for years, and McNealy said Solaris 10 is an important part of the company's transformation.
"It's kind of the tent pole — it just kind of holds up the whole deal," he said.
Last month, Sun announced its second consecutive quarter of revenue growth, though profits remain elusive. McNealy believes the company he co-founded in 1982 has already turned the corner, though the financials have yet to show it.
"There's always a lag with companies our size," McNealy said. "And that's assuming we're not making dumb mistakes right now that I don't know about."
AIX (from IBM) is already close to this. The OS is about $250 even on servers that are a quarter mill in cost.
LQ
Wow. Slowaris for free. Be still my beating heart.
And the kicker is - Windows XP STILL turns out to be a better deal!
:)
Should I down load it? Is it like XP?
LOL- yeah - put it on gramma's PC and watch her surf the net- be sure to get a unix/linux/solarix (they are all the same) geek over to 'mount' her drives
It's a Unix-based server/workstation operating system. It doesn't have much to offer a home user.
"And the kicker is - Windows XP STILL turns out to be a better deal!"
Not if you have weekly crashes!
bump
Oh...thanks.
Whoa!! From the headline, I thought the sun was giving out. Don't know where I was going, but I was ready to pack my bags.
If nothing else, it will be interesting to play around with for a while.
Well, it's a server OS. Get Grandma a Mac. In fact, get ANYONE who doesn't need to share files with PC users a Mac. Windows XP is usable and pretty stable, but it still imposes too much of a knowledge burden on people who aren't computer-literate.
Who crashes these days? I haven't seen a desktop crash in years. The days of poorly written shareware and cheap hardware are mostly gone now. I think the deciding factor these days is price and functionality, then the cool factor.
Did your mother ever have any children that lived?
Unix, Linux, and Solaris are not the same thing. Not by a long shot. That you even say so means you don't know what you are talking about. I won't fuel any flame wars by saying which is best. I will say I'd a Posix based OS before Windows.
I haven't seen the new Solaris yet, but plug and play is not new to Unices. Mounting drives is no larger a task in Linux than it is in windows.
If you do put Linux or Solaris on granny's computer, she will be far safer from worms and trojans than she is with Windows.
Everything since ME is pretty bad about crashing and MS doesn't seem to be too concerned. I'm waiting for a crash at MS and see if they can reboot.
As a recent Apple convert, give me OS X any day....
That would be dtrace. A truly awesome system-level tracing tool, nothing like it anywhere else among the mainstream server operating systems. I'm anxious to proof out version 10 in my lab so I can get a head start on my clients most of whom will start deploying it into low-criticality production servers in 2006 if past history is any indication. So much technology, so little time and so few servers to work with...
Yup. The very thing.
So much technology, so little time and so few servers to work with...
I'm right there with you. We're just starting to move to Solaris 9 on our servers here. I'd really be interested even more if dtrace is actually portable across architectures. If it will compile on Linux and is usable, that would really rock. I kinda doubt it though, as it will be pretty dependent upon the proc subsystems.
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