Three months before the latest deluge of quarterly news from Sun, including more indications that Solaris could turn open source, I asked Open Source Initiative president Eric Raymond--who had just written an open letter to Sun about open sourcing Java--whether he'd consider asking Sun to open source Solaris as well.

But the feature that shows up on the Linux pedestal more than any other is the license under which it's available: the GNU General Public License. Until very recently, you could not only build your own distribution (including modification of the source) according to your own rules, but you could lay your hands on just about every implementation ("distributions" in Linux parlance) at no charge.

While the "modify the source" part resonates with the highly technical and hacking elements of the open source community, most enterprises have demonstrated stronger interest in Linux's cost and modularity. They want to know how they can take "OTS" (that's "COTS" or "commercial off the shelf software" without the "C") and drive down their total cost of ownership with entirely free software stacks like LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL and take your pick of PHP, Perl, or Python). These days, you might as well throw "J" for the JBOSS Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based application server into the mix and think about substituting an "I" for the "M" now that Computer Associates has tossed Ingres into the open source ring.

The GPL is what makes all of this perceived-to-be-bottom-line-friendly IT possible. I say "perceived" because, by now, most research outfits have published findings that, over the long run, the cost advantages of open source over commercial alternatives are overblown. Even so, the GPL hasn't traditionally been a friend to the commercial versions of Unix like Solaris.

But, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz is confident that's about to change--and not necessarily because Sun is considering the open sourcing of Solaris.

Schwartz claims that the lack of binary compatibility between Red Hat and SuSE Linux (the only credible enterprise-ready distributions) is causing enterprises to lose interest in the "L" part of LAMP. Instead, suggests Schwartz, given Red Hat's market share and the fact that it's the first pick when other enterprise vendors like Dell and Oracle choose to support Linux, the acronym might well be changed to RAMP ("R" for Red Hat).

Schwartz's characterization of the Linux market is fair. According to IDC, Red Hat is the dominant supplier of Linux, coming in with more than 60 percent share of the market. Schwartz claims that Red Hat's market dominance, coupled with the fact that it's charging for an operating system that isn't binary compatible with its peers, has neutralized the value of GPL to enterprise customers.

From Sun's point of view, those market conditions play directly into Sun's plans for the x86 version of Solaris.

Lack of binary compatibility between distributions gives Red Hat the same lock-in leverage over customers that vendors of proprietary operating systems have. The GPL may be what made the Red Hat "stack" possible in the first place, but beyond that, Schwartz believes the GPL is no longer a competitive factor. Once customers are locked in, Red Hat can charge whatever it wants. Says Schwartz, "ISVs and customers don't qualify to a license agreement. They qualify to a stack of software and hardware. So the GPL is not what makes Red Hat competitive. Red Hat's ability to integrate and have ISVs qualify to a proprietary stack of software that only they provide is what makes Red Hat competitive. The GPL is ultimately competitive to Red Hat if just anyone can build what Red Hat provides. That's why Red Hat's doing their best to diverge from SuSE -- and why their customers are seeing price hikes."

By price hikes, Schwartz is no doubt referring to that Red Hat's about-face in its pricing strategy last year whereby its hardware-certified enterprise-ready offerings -- the workstation, enterprise server and advanced server versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) -- could no longer be had for free. While the change in business model may have disappointed some in the Linux community, Red Hat's run rate for subscriptions to RHEL have exceeded the company's expectations and the results are reflecting in the company's financial performance. In its last quarterly disclosure, Red Hat reported its fourth consecutive quarter of profitability.

Therefore, Solaris--if you believe Schwartz--isn't competing with Linux or the GPL. It's competing with Red Hat. And Schwartz believes it's a battle Sun can easily win based not only on features and performance, but also on price, now that RHEL's pricing is more in line with proprietary alternatives. "We're continuing to invest in our OS, Solaris running on Opteron, Intel and Sparc," said Schwartz. "So we've got a lot more flexibility to continue driving improvements, and price/performance. That's why you'll see Solaris on x86 systems priced lower than Red Hat." In March, Sun announced a subscription model for Solaris.

If you're a Linux or open source advocate who's ready to buy into Schwartz's theory, I suggest you first check with Red Hat. On the surface, Red Hat does tout the GPL as being advantageous to its customers. According to Red Hat spokesperson Leigh Day, "Red Hat is very much an open source play, and not a proprietary company." But when I asked how RHEL differs from proprietary alternatives now that Red Hat customers must pay to use it and it's not binary compatible with other versions of Linux, Day conceded that RHEL's unique selling proposition has more to do with traditional operating system and vendor selection criteria than it does with the GPL.

"Red Hat's customers are able to change the code to suit their needs," said Day. Challenging the binary incompatibility claim with respect to Red Hat's chief competitor, Day went on to say that "Red Hat's products are Linux Standards Base (LSB) compliant and so are SuSE's." Regarding Red Hat's recently introduced paid model, Day said, "When a customer signs up for a subscription model from Red Hat, it includes technology, services, and maintenance. Support falls under services. Customers can sign up for a year-long subscription, and at end of that year, if they decide they can support the implementation on their own, they're free to continue using it without paying at all. With proprietary offerings, at end of the licensing agreement, you have to sign up for a new license, or you can't use the software. With us, you can take your toys and go home."

This is pure FUD. Red Hat may indeed allow you to take your toys and go home, but the bit about how this can't be done with competing server operating systems is simply not true. For a long time, perpetual licenses have been available from Sun and even Microsoft. According to Sunny Charlebois, Microsoft's product manager for worldwide licensing and pricing, "The licenses for Windows are perpetual and do not require a new license to continue using the software. The only exceptions are with either an Enterprise Agreement Subscription (EAS) license or a Campus/School Agreement."

Of these two non-perpetual Microsoft licenses, it's obviously the EAS to which Day was referring, although I have to question the worthiness of EAS as a comparative data point based on the number of organizations that opt for it instead of a perpetual licensing deal. According to Microsoft's Charlebois, "An [EAS] is a software volume licensing program designed for corporate customers with 250 or more desktops who prefer to subscribe to-rather than purchase-Microsoft software licenses. Software licenses offered through the [EAS] program are non-perpetual, meaning that product use rights are only in effect for the term of the enrollment." In other words, if you're an EAS-based Microsoft customer, then Day is right. Once you stop paying the licensing fee, you can't take your toys and go home.

But in reality, using the EAS program as the basis for licensing cost comparisons doesn't reflect how the bulk of Microsoft's customers are acquiring the right to use Windows. According to Gartner analyst Betsy Burton, based on the minimal savings and the headaches associated with subscription licenses (versus perpetual ones), there's minimal interest in the EAS program. "Very few of Microsoft's enterprise customers are leasing their software," said Burton. "It's less than 10 percent. The reason is that the discount over what it costs to get it outright is 15 percent at most and the buyout [to keep the software at the end of the subscription] is prohibitive."

With the licensing comparison debunked, I challenged Day on each the remaining three arguments on the grounds that most enterprise customers don't modify the source code, prefer to pay for support, and that, despite RHEL's LSB compliance, lack of full binary compatibility with competitors like SuSE is enough of a deterrent to keep most companies from enduring the pain of a switch. Day agreed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn't nearly as differentiated from proprietary competitors such as Windows and Unix as it once was.

According to Day, "Most of our enterprise customers are not really changing code." Day also concurred that enterprises rarely discontinue their support contracts and the barrier to switching is significant enough to keep most enterprises from doing it. But she also stressed that for a customer that really wanted to switch, LSB-compliance means the switch would be far less painful than switching from RHEL to Solaris or Windows.

After hearing what Sun's Schwartz had to say, Day said, "He's trying to show how Sun can be competitive with Red Hat." Then Day asked rhetorically, "Why are people migrating from Unix to RHEL?" Her honest, GPL FUD-free answer was, "Because it's better, faster, and cheaper."

Quality, performance and TCO
One year ago, Schwartz might have agreed that RHEL was better, faster, and cheaper. But today, Schwartz says, Solaris is prepared to do battle on quality, performance, and total cost of ownership (note, no mention of the GPL). Earlier this year, during a press briefing in Boston, Schwartz said, "The biggest knock against Solaris has been that it's just slower than Red Hat. To address that, we've been working on performance. Pick any benchmark. We are almost uniformly beating Red Hat on every benchmark, and not just on what's typically been our strong points -- 16-, 32-, and 64-way systems. Everyone knows the load curves on Solaris have been fabulous [on those higher end systems]. But, the issue has been on 1-,2- and 4-way systems. That's where we've been focused."

With a subscription model for Solaris that's designed to meet or beat Red Hat's pricing in his back pocket, Schwartz went on to say, "If we can beat Red Hat [in performance], then at least one of the issues--price/performance--disappears."

Sounding more like a combatant in a traditional battle of operating systems where the playing field is leveling, Day argued that "Red Hat has world record benchmarks. We can show that we have the fastest performance out there of any operating systems. And we are cheaper. Look at the days of Unix and the cost of the hardware. If Sun is [doing a subscription model for Solaris x86 and claiming better performance], then that's a new strategy for them."

Another open source-related benefit, which Day cautioned customers not to lose sight of, is how innovation is borne out of the contributions of so many developers. "The open source development model is different from the proprietary model because more individuals and partners are contributing code and driving innovation," Day noted. "Red Hat has a lot to contribute to the source. We have the top kernel developers working for us."

Here again, Schwartz is ready to go toe-to-toe with any competing operating system developers, and touts Solaris' recent achievements. "We've added LPAR [logical partition] class partitioning so you can divide a single CPU into a near infinite number of partitions, each with their own hostname, IP address, root password and privileges, and ability to reboot. You can have a single CPU system that behaves like 20 servers, or a 64-way system that behaves like 2,000. This fundamentally divorces the relationship between an OS and the underlying hardware, and lets customers not only drive utilization, but reap huge savings in software license fees."

On the topic of functionality and innovation, Schwartz asked, "What happens if Red Hat's customers need a fix that requires some kernel work? If Red Hat makes a change that's counter to what Linus Torvalds wants, who wins? When you call Sun, I get the calls on weekends and midnights… and I get our engineers working on the problem. [But with Red Hat], they're not necessarily applying their R&D or their engineers to go solve their customers problems. We certainly are."

In response, Day touts the responsiveness of Red Hat's engineering resources to customers needs. "We just had a situation where we delivered something to customers that they really wanted," said Day. "We announced RHEL 3 in October, and it was based on version 2.4 of the Linux kernel. But we took a feature in the 2.6 kernel--the Native Posix Threading Library--and backported it to RHEL. It's a feature that's not generally available from other distributions."

Basically, Red Hat and Sun are each saying that they're better positioned than the other to respond in a timely fashion to customers' needs. They might even agree that the playing field is fairly level and that customer choice will be influenced by standard criteria like price, performance, features and functionality.

If the benefits of the GPL have given way to more traditional competitive criteria as Solaris prepares to do battle with RHEL, and Red Hat girds for the onslaught, there still remains one area where Red Hat does indeed have a significant lead: support from systems manufacturers.

Whereas Schwartz said, "We've also qualified Solaris on more than 200 hardware platforms so customers can pick and choose," Red Hat's Day said, "We've also succeeded on the OEM front. We have preload agreements with Dell, IBM, HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NEC." In other words, some new OEM-relationships may be in the works for Sun. Who might they be with? Schwartz didn't provide specifics, but he dropped a few hints. For example, given Sun's new and tightly knit relationship with AMD, perhaps the first partnerships will be with manufacturers of Opteron-based systems. Or, given the hay that Schwartz makes over Red Hat's inability to indemnify its customers or its partner OEMs from lawsuits like the ones that SCO has launched, perhaps we'll see some more traditional vendors like Dell adding Solaris to their menu as a fully-indemnified alternative to their Red Hat-preload options.

According to Gartner's Burton, "Indemnification is critical. It's somewhere around fourth or fifth in overall terms of what's most important to enterprise buyers." Referring to SCO's recent lawsuit's against companies like AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, Burton said, "Large companies are scared to death to have their names dragged through the mud."

With the GPL playing a much lesser role in the delivery of enterprise benefits, the Red Hat-Sun battle has all the makings of a more competitive marketplace for operating systems Sun appears to be making all the right moves to not only keep Red Hat from winning new business, but to bring some existing Red Hat customers back to Unix.

Day's response to Sun's mounting challenge: "Winning is all about the relationship between the customer and vendor. We're a tough competitor and we're ready."

Indeed, with its foot much further in the door than Sun is with Solaris x86, Red Hat is not only ready with Red Hat Enteprise Linux, but coming from a position a strength. But, Sun's own unique positions of strength (engineering, indemnification, accountability, etc.) are not to be underestimated, either.

If you're just now in the throes of an "*ix" decision, you should probably give Sun and Solaris x86 one last look as a matter of due diligence before making that final commitment.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.

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Posted by: myfevertoy Posted on: 10/22/06  (Edited: 11/22/06 @ 05:04) You are currently: a Guest | Log in | Terms of Use

Lock-in under a new guise  sujai.nath@... | 06/10/04

Good article...  No_Ax_to_Grind | 06/10/04

Non Sequitur  Yagotta B. Kidding | 06/10/04

Interesting Analysis  Peter Komisar | 06/10/04

Binary incompatibility?  Yagotta B. Kidding | 06/10/04

formatting  toadlife | 06/10/04

Links work  toadlife | 06/10/04

Test  P. Douglas | 06/11/04

Thanks! (NT)  P. Douglas | 06/11/04

Well...  P. Douglas | 06/11/04

correction  toadlife | 06/11/04

T  Linux User 147560 | 06/13/04

Great artical. And we really do need binary compatibility.  DonnieBoy | 06/10/04

Here I have to  Linux User 147560 | 06/13/04

Binary compatability only in a monopoly  Knorthern Knight | 06/10/04

Binary compatability on the same architecture IS important.  DonnieBoy | 06/10/04

Support is sometimes hard to get  amrs | 06/11/04

Reality Bites.  CDarklock | 06/11/04

Companies like Sun are not going away  toadlife | 06/11/04

I know what you mean.  computer_man | 06/14/04

Message has been deleted.  myfevertoy | 10/22/06

The Open Source Boogeyman  CDarklock | 06/11/04

Gee you must be right  Richard Flude | 06/12/04

How about up2date source  tgr4ripe | 06/11/04

What do you think?

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