Sun's Schwartz Speaks Out on Linux, SCO

EWeek ^ | 09/19/03 | Unknown

[Salo]

Sun Microsystems Inc. last week announced its Java Enterprise System and its Java Desktop, which will fundamentally change Sun's software pricing, delivery and licensing models. After the announcement at the Sun Network conference in San Francisco, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president for software, sat down with eWEEK senior editor Peter Galli.

[Salo]

Sun recommends you buy their products. Film at 11.

[Salo]

Paging Dr. Penguin.

[Salo]

More grist. Same mill.

[Tokhtamish]

But nobody supports Solaris on x86. A year ago I bought Solaris 8 on x86 and couldn't get it to support even a modest video card on a Pentium II 533. I hope Solaris 9 on x86 is better.

And as for Oracle, there is a dinky version of Oracle 8.1.7 running on Solaris on x86. That's it. No Financials, no Developer, no JDeveloper, no Application Server, no....

[isthisnickcool]

This guy is smoking crack.

[CodeMonkey]

I wonder when these guys are going to wake up to the performance differences between Java for Windows/Solaris and Java for OSX. When they do, it'll be sudden as though one of Apple's engineers gave a good punt to the crotch to Sun's Java engineers......

[CheneyChick]

LOL!

[CodeMonkey]

I have seen benchmarks before that put OSX's Java at up to 300% faster than Sun's Windows version. I don't have them anymore, but this is why:

Sun's JVM isolates each Java program for the rest completely. When you load 5 Java apps with Sun's JVM you are loading 5 instances of the VM, compiling and linking 5 new sets of the standard libraries and not sharing one iota of any of that workload between all 5 VMs.

Apple's VM's just in time compiler takes the final version of the shared code from the standard libraries and puts it into a separate shared memory space. When you load 1 Java app, it does the work and the next 4 just get linked against what's in that shared memory space. That's why Java desktop apps will perform pretty well on a 300-400mhz G3, but not so well on a comparable PC running Windows.

That's the explanation that I've seen from summaries of a Mac developer conference where Apple's Java guys explained how they rewrote most of the JVM.

[CheneyChick]

Very interesting. Thanks!

[Bush2000]

I have seen benchmarks before that put OSX's Java at up to 300% faster than Sun's Windows version. I don't have them anymore...

Surrrrrrrre, rrrrrrright. I'll believe it when you can produce numbers from a credible source. Sun has cooked Java numbers (SunSoft's Solaris Java compiler rigged for benchmark) in the past. So has Apple (Apple's G5 benchmarks are false). Combined, you have a dubious cocktail.

[eno_]

This guy is smoking crack.

Sun's whole approach is insanely screwy: They announce a pretty cool Linux distro with an interesting desktop a few weeks AFTER they pour money into Darl McBride's feckless crusade.

The aviation term for Sun's strategy is "Controlled flight into terrain."

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all.

That's like Ted Kennedy not being able to answer the question "Why do you want to be president?" during the 1980's campaign. The first step in getting where you're going is to know we're you're going. This is nuts.

We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period.

Huh? Whatever this guy is smoking, I definitely don't want any. How many Web servers are running Linux and Apache? How many people have set up Linux boxes as file servers? This guy makes Microsoft look good by comparison.

[steve-b]

Some critics are saying that it's not just Microsoft funding SCO but also Sun, citing the fact that you acquired another license from them recently, received warrants to buy shares in SCO and are losing the most customers in the migration from Unix to Linux. It thus makes enormous sense for Sun to fund SCO, their logic goes. How do you respond to that?

Oops -- should have ended with "How do you answer that?" As it is, the Sun flack is not pinned down, and can "respond" with any sort of irrelevant dribble.