On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:27:38 -0700, Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said: > Like most tech companies that have seen better days, Sun's been > cutting costs to the bone; I'm sure that they don't feel rich. This is true. I'm not sure how many rounds of layoffs we've had over the last five years, but there were many, and I'm not completely sure that we're done. It's also true that we're not behaving as well as we should in this situation. I've forwarded several messages in this thread to people at Sun who might be in a position to make a difference: from where I sit, it looks like a situation where having a few of our engineers contributing directly to these segments of the open source community would help a lot. Also from where I sit, Sun is trying to do the right thing. We've been consistently open sourcing key components of our software for some time now, and are trying (not always successfully, we have a learning curve like everybody else) to build new communities and participate in existing ones. And we're trying to be as open to mixing and matching as we possibly can: we'd prefer for you to run Solaris on Sun hardware (I was going to write on Sparc, but we're actually quite agnostic on the x86/Sparc choice these days), but we're more than happy to sell you Sun hardware where you run your choice of OS on it (Solaris, a few versions of Linux, and we even announced a Windows OEM deal last week), and we're also quite happy to have you run Solaris on other people's hardware (see the IBM Solaris announcement last month). And if you run other OSes on other hardware, well, that's a learning opportunity for us, but would you like to run Java? Or maybe just the JVM with, say, JRuby on top? Or use OpenOffice? And if you want to build your own box with our chip design, that's great too! But obviously we're not doing a perfect job; in particular, we're clearly not doing as good a job on the Sparc + Linux quadrant as we should. Please continue to try to keep us honest, but do so with the realization that we're fallible, we're resource-constrained, and we can't do everything at once. I am speaking purely as an individual; I am currently employed by Sun, and I have a soft spot for GCC (I used to work on GDB before being hired by Sun), but my current work is completely unrelated to compiler toolchain issues. (Other than as a user!) And I have no particular influence on Sun's resource allocation or open source behavior. David Carlton david.carlton@xxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
