why ? because it scales!
In the past i ranted a bit or two about Sun Microsystems. Today i feel the need to do it again. Make no mistake – I like them, i have only Sun servers and storage, the other side of a glass wall just behind me, but fact is that the last news aren’t that encouraging. At first sight it may seem that Sun is really doing all the right things – opensourced Solaris (in way incompatible with linux), opensourced java (GPL) and at least has some momentum (and truth be said – two or three great technologies).
They even hired Debian’s founder and, previously, Linux Foundation CTO, to coordinate their software and OS strategy but ultimately that won ‘t be enough. The first public declarations of Ian Murdock, in his new role, touch all the right spots – starting with the arcane and simplistic packaging tools that solaris provides, so why do i feel pessimistic ? Well, short answer is because Ian is debian’s founder. Long answer is a bit more complex. Both the debian and rpm packaging systems are ‘fine’ enough to serve the current biggest distros around but truth is that they are truly dated. Ian Murdock seems to think that given Solaris inherent superiority, it would be enough having decent tools as RedHat or Suse or Ubuntu, to compete. If he and Sun management really think that, then they are for a surprise, because they are wrong, RH is wrong, Canonical is wrong, Suse is wrong. This is no more just about the stack – it is about what the flexibility you could get from it.
Let’s be honest – Solaris is late at this party. In order to really compete they must not match the competition but simply outdo them. To that they need to look seriously at packaging, at new distribution models, at something that makes solaris ‘invisible’ the the eyes of a linux user (Sun doesn’t talk much about that but they know how many x86 solaris boxes they sell and how many will end running linux, like here) yet compelling. Nor rpm nor debian would allow for that, they would allow Sun to be equal, not much better or different. In fact the majority of current packaging models simply won ‘t scale. They need, the whole at large needs a paradigm change, one that allows to be evolutionary while revolutionary.
I’m afraid that given Ian’s past he would not be brave enough to look closely at something so disruptive that sooner or later will put debs and rpms as footnotes of story – conary. Yeah! really. A way to give ISVs a way to abstract above the OS, a way – the only way so far – to really shine above the water.
Then again, maybe he likes the old ways of doing things. Foresight, the leading conary based distribution, was recently reviewed by eWeek. We were already put in the same league as Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu (and we are only in the beginning) but one thing was not said – we have, for sure, way less than 1/100 of their manpower. The secret sauce ? conary. Why ? because it scales! Yeah – it’s really that disruptive.