Sun Acquires CFS/Lustre, Becomes Windows OEM 138
anzha writes "Sun Microsystems announced today that they are acquiring Cluster File Systems Inc. CFS owns the intellectual property related to and develops the open source file system known as Lustre." Relatedly Sun has also signed an agreement with Microsoft to be a Windows OEM. "Sun and Microsoft will work together to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs well as a guest on Sun's virtualization technologies. Sun and Microsoft will work together on a support process for customers who are using the virtualization solutions. This joint commitment to customers ensures that Windows and Solaris will provide a solid virtualization experience."
Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Fighting off Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, it's Sun that's Schizophrenic (Score:5, Interesting)
Penguine suit McNeally *loves* linux. Then sun joins with scox to kill Linux. Then sun tells us that only sun linux is legal. Then sun tells that linux is great - but only as a desktop, not a server. Finally sun tells us that linux is java.
Sun's official opinions on msft, and on x86 technology, have been equally schitzo. One day sun curses msft as an evil company, with crap technology, the next day, sun is msft's biggest bestest buddy in the whole wide world. One day sun sneers at all things x86, the next day sun is releasing x86 solaris - then sun is cranking out x86 windows boxes.
So when sun stops flip-flopping on everything, maybe people will stop flip-flopping on their opinions about sun.
Sadly... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, let's consider what Sun gets out of Lustre. This is clearly competition against Polyserve's take-over by HP, as there simply aren't any other rivals to Luster that Sub could have been threatened by. By all accounts, however, Polyserve's products were superior and it is unlikely Sun can survive a direct confrontation with what is (relatively speaking) not much more than a toothpick.
Microsoft? Their Cluster Edition has minimal clustering capability, is truly painful to use, suffers from horrible network filesystem access, and really should be put out of its misery. (I'd suggest finding a suitable volcano and dropping all copies of the source code into it.)
CFS, then! Beep, wrong answer! ClusterFS stand to lose their top developers (that's the usual consequence of such a merger), Sun just don't understand OSS and have a near-xenophobic reaction towards Linux, and precisely because the politics will be very hot, it will be impossible for third-paries to propose any necessary hooks or speedups. Everyone'll be too focussed on the battle.
So Sun and Microsoft get no tangible benefit beyond the elimination of a potential competitor who they could never have matched on a fair playing field. Linux? 1% of the market and the rate of rising is so slow that you could probably find the correct asymptotic equation for it. Besides, when has Microsft ever done anything that wasn't money-making?
There will be no winners in this takeover, only losers. GFS is so dead and beyond the grave that only zombies use it. Oracle OFS2 is no better, abandoned by Oracle themselves and suffering from really bad latency. At least that explains why Mr. Whitham worships at its feet - fools will follow fools. Intermezzo? Merged, abandoned and then unmerged. What a complete waste of time for the core kernel developers. CODA? Right, when did they last do a new tarball?
There are questions as to whether a DFS is even needed - if you can migrate code to data, on the grounds that data is going to typically larger anyway - then you are moving everything from process space to process space (so don't need a filesystem for the processes) and local data would be locally seen. A few people have tried this idea out with mixed success.
I'll wrap up by saying that yes, the little guys do need oxygen. But they're thrice fools if they buy it from the people who shoved them in the airlock in the first place. You seriously think that people who have a long history of betraying users, betraying employees, betraying legal obligations and betraying those in an alliance with it should be trusted with ANYTHING? You think that treachery and financial debauchery didn't play a bigger factor in the death of Spyglass than some perceived "accidental" conflict in their relationship? If a serial spouse abuser gets hauled up in court for the tenth time for the same crime, you'd have to be dumber than beyond to seriously believe the person without some damn convincing evidence.
So why treat this any different? We know about the copyright violations by Microsoft, the open willingness to "murder" in some sense the competition, the open and knowing violation of anti-trust laws, the willingness to ignore reasonable and direct court orders and demands, and so on. If their users can be considered married to their product, Microsoft is guilty of spousal abuse on a grand scale for decades.
What else is different? There's no symbiosis. There's nothing in common between Sun and Microsoft. The don't even use the same type of CPU. Nor is there any between Sun and Linux. Sun's attitudes in the past five to ten years has been nothing short of disgusting. They get CFS and I pretty much guarantee you won't see a damn thing, if they ever distribute anything at all. Don't assume they will.
Re:Hey, it worked for SGI... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, FWIW I won't buy Novell any more (Score:4, Interesting)
Before you accept any reassurances from Novell, actually READ the published parts of their agreement with MS. Its reassurances are trash, garbage, worthless. And *THAT'S* the part they weren't too ashamed to reveal.