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Sun Hires Debian GNU/Linux Founder

blogs.sun.com — The founder of Debian GNU/Linux, chair of the Linux Standards Base and outgoing CTO of the Linux Foundation, Ian Murdock has joined Sun Microsystems as Chief Operating Platforms Officer. Sun's Chief Open Source Officer announced the news on his blog today.

Who dugg this? Made popular Mar 19, 2007

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  • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13wow, nice move Sun! This is gonna be a huge year for opensolaris. Hopefully opensolaris will become more Linux compatible as well, considering Murdock is on the chair of Linux Standards Base.
  • Wyzard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9AFAIK, he's not closely affiliated with Debian anymore anyway. He left to create Progeny, I believe.

    Ian working for Sun shouldn't have much of an effect on Debian at all.
  • gharding, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Oracle was just trying to ***** with Redhat. Sun is in a different league. I don't think anything bad will come of it.
  • jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I hope this isn't like an Oracle-attempt-to-*****-with-Linux (which failed anyways)

    I have some respect for Sun, but I don't trust them completely

    But they did open Java...
  • freefm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Wow, sun is really embracing open standards now. I don't think I'm going to switch from Red Hat (Cent OS) to Solaris for my server needs, but there are some great tools (The ZFS) if you have a monster server setup. I love watching all the "This is why we're 23.5 X better than Red Hat" sales pitches. Whatever though, I'm interested to see if my old Sun stock will go up after being completely flat for the last 10 years.
  • raynevandunem, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4No, that was, allegedly, Eric Raymond.

    http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/Microsoft_tries_to_recruit_me_Very_funny_response

    EDIT: Well, Daniel *was* hired. Eric turned - no, SLAMMED - the offer down with considerably ill, exclaimingly public feeling.
  • tgunner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4For people taking shots at Solaris: it is not a desktop / workstation system, it is designed for programming, server, and database type work.
  • Freddfx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4that was daniel robbins, founder of Gentoo
  • gclef, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Which is what I use Solaris for...but we're moving away from it at my office in favor of Linux, for a few reasons:

    1) Many libraries and applications that are simple package installs on Linux become week-long compile-and-dependency hells on Solaris. (eg: Installing trac on solaris was a real mess.)

    2) Sun's really annoying tendency to re-do GNU tools themselves, but with slightly different interfaces (Sun's tar is different than the GNU tar, SUN's sed is different than the GNU sed). Lots of packages assume GNU tools, so I then have to fight the existing ones (SUNs packages need their sed, but other installs need the GNU one, so my path keeps changing...gah) to get installs done.

    3) Performance. The common feeling is that Sun is all about big iron and heavy lifting...problem is, it isn't always true. Example: we have a syslog app that's seeing hundreds-to-thousands of messages a second (yes, that's a lot of data). Our apps to process those on Solaris couldn't get past about 400 messages a second. On a similar-priced x86 box with Debian, it'll hit 4000-or-so events per second.

    I've been managing Sun boxes for years now, but honestly, it's not worth it anymore...For us, Debian x86 boxes are kicking Sun's butt (which might go some way to explaining their hire of this guy).
  • bestadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm getting more and more excited, the Solaris operating system on a GPL3 license seems quite possible as they move forward. After all Ian Murdock has been a strong supporter of the Free Software Foundation. The distribution he started was the only major distribution willing to call itself GNU/Linux (despite the rather strange branding difficulties the name creates, and Debian has always been closest to the Free Software Foundation in philosophy (again speaking relative to big ones such as Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE).

    Debian GNU/Solaris anyone?
  • motang, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Well Debian has been having bad lately, as they postponed their release. So I hope it would not effect any thing of Debian, and hopefully we would see Etch released soon.
  • jakethecake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/03/19/murdock_sun/ FAQ :D
  • Tumdian, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2this guy is lives in my home town, and is a legend in the LUG community there. good move, Sun!!!
  • raynevandunem, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki
  • drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ya the best thing that Sun can do right now is ship GNU+Debian-based userland on OpenSolaris.

    It seems that is the way they want to go. Debian already is a very complete package with strong policies that make sense as well as a high degree of quality control. Also it's not associated with either Redhat or Suse, which Sun wants to compete against. And this is probably one of the most important considurations.

    If they end up getting a very good OpenSolaris/Debian port going that would pretty much solve all of Sun's software compatability problems. Then the choices for admins would be between the relative merits of Linux vs Solaris rather then being forced to choose either platform based on the software compatability requirements.

    Keep in mind that Debian already has non-Linux ports, namely Debian-ized versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Hurd. (although these are not nearly as complete and are not remotely as popular as Linux-based Debian)

    The downside (for Sun) is that Debian are licensing nazis, so legal wise Sun needs to prove beyond a doubt that they are a Free software company if they want the attention of Debian developers, unless they want to go it alone. Seems like the move to GPL Java and move to go with the GPLv3 license for Sun is a good way to accomplish that.
  • natalic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe now Sun's Solaris will be better...Because I used it and it was not that great.
  • jlebrech, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Darn Poachers, leave the Debian guys alone. They are perfectly happy working for free.
  • SimonGray, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Didn't Microsoft try to hire him once?
  • baalzebub, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1lmao :)
  • footcheese, on 10/12/2007, -7/+4This seems like really bad news. What does this mean for Debian? I really don't know the politics, I just use Debian.
  • Elranzer, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Is this a good or bad thing? Does this mean the current champion of Debian-based Linux is Canonical?
  • footcheese, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0And what about APT?

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