The Linux Extremist

In my youth, I attended a good number of parties, most of which, surprisingly enough, I was actually invited to attend. I knew I wasn’t cool and that was cool, so long as I didn’t pretend to be cool and scoffed down as much free alcohol as I could get my hands on.

Not everyone was as content as I was with living in the ghetto of persistent dorkiness. At these events, there were few things that were more painful to see than other lads who trying to break out of the cul-de-sac of the technically inclined: they were the people who weren’t cool who were trying their damndest to be cool. Seeing that sheer amount of effort wasted on styling with hair gel, splashing on the “right” cologne which was invariably cheap and wrong, and pretending to know something about the latest music was enough to make me want to bleed from the eyes in embarassment. They never realised that being cool is an effortless quality, and it comes, in part, from knowing what is right at the right time, rather than making a lot of wild guesses. Some people don’t know, and it’s OK. Trying to fake this knowledge moves you up a notch from being a dork to a twerp.

I recalled all this yesterday while reading about Sun’s new servers. According to The Register, Sun is dishing out a bunch of new kit based on AMD’s Operton chip in its “latest gamble”. One of the servers, nicknamed “Thumper”, is reported to have capacity for 48 SATA hard drives. Apparently Sun is trying to say - hey YOU ALL, look at our bunch of new processors, and WOW, 12 Terabytes of storage, and its Porsche pricetag of $33,000!

This is like the swagger of a dorky kid at one of the parties I attended, who mistakenly thought that stuffing a rolled up sock in his trousers made him a hot property. It just goes to prove that there is something worse than someone who is not cool who is going through great pains to be cool: it is someone who was cool trying to capture his lost mojo.

I’m old enough to remember when Sun was at the forefront of the internet revolution: their servers and the Solaris operating system were the gold standard for all the great and not-so-great websites. People may want to forget boo.com, particularly the people who gave them the $185 million that they never saw again, but one thing that’s worth remembering is that the owners paid a king’s ransom to Sun for a server that barely fit in a railway boxcar. This was just so they could have sufficient computing power to run their one site. It was the biggest, the best, and the most obvious solution, even to people as oblivious to the obvious as those who ran Boo.

Another example: I worked for a travel company that got online in 1996. At that time there was no question, the servers had to be Sun, the OS had to be Solaris. I suspect Sun’s management at that period were like Leonardo Di Caprio in “Titanic”, leading over the edge and screaming, “We’re the kings of the world!” I can picture them taking a dip in a Scrooge McDuck type vault singing “We’re in the money”. Scott McNealy probably could have had lap dancers gyrating in his office to the sound “Gangsta’s Paradise” while he caused a coup in a 3rd world country, but because at that time, Sun was making so much money, no one would care.

By 2003, however, the once kings of the internet were a dorky, expensive pain in the rump. My travel company was still paying a king’s ransom to Sun, Sun still thought they were cool, but in the background we were moving to Red Hat and saying “So long, you twerps”.

It wasn’t just us. Sun has been losing ground to Linux on Intel (and AMD) for quite a long time. What’s really funny about it is that they were in denial for so long. They were the last major server manufacturer to embrace Open Source; they only did it when they realised that the hair gel and cheap cologne of marketing wasn’t working on anyone anymore. They desperately had to get their cool back.

Unfortunately, it’s working about as well as 2006 version of Henry Winkler trying to put on a leather jacket and saying “Hey!”. The stigma of twerpiness is very hard to shake off once you’ve got it. Sun tried, not only by making Solaris Open Source, but now also by making their SPARC processors open source too. Someone forgot to tell Sun’s management, I think, that while it’s fairly easy to work on source code at home or at a university, it’s not quite the same for making a processor. Speaking for myself, my home isn’t a zero-dust environment, and I’m not about to go mucking about with trying to build my own processor in my study.

Perhaps having realised how out of it they are, now Sun is swaggering into the party saying they’ve got the biggest, most powerful servers of all. Hear them roar, I presume. It looks more like bad chat up lines being tried in rapid fire succession on all the girls at a teenage party, the lasses rolling their over-eyeshadowed eyes in disgust and turning on over high-heels to storm off and get another shot of bad rum and fruit punch.

So what does Sun need to do? One, is to forget the idea they are ever going to climb back to the position they once were in. To even think that they are is about as realistic as expecting the Byzantine Empire to come back; watching Sun’s management is like witnessing some Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians in Istanbul saying, “This time, next year, the Emperor of the Romans will have returned to us.” Um, not.

Secondly, if you really believe that Open Source is your friend, Sun, then do something which you haven’t dared to do yet. It’s easy to make Solaris and SPARC Open Source when they’re losing market share. How about really showing the commitment and making the most successful Sun contribution in modern times (namely Java) Open Source too. Well? We’re waiting.

Companies like Red Hat have shown that you can be committed to Open Source and still make money; you may not be the Kings of the World like Sun once was, but Red Hat doesn’t need to be. They’d rather just be profitable. Perhaps when Sun realises the wisdom of that particular stance, maybe, just maybe, they’ll not be the twerps of the industry any longer.

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