June 20th, 2006
Sun's 5,000 layoffs and 5 million OpenSolaris downloads
Tom Foremski has the scoop on Sun’s forthcoming layoffs. The axe is scheduled to fall on Thursday, which is the same day that Jonathan Schwartz will be giving a speech at the Supernova 2006 conference in San Francisco (I’ll be there). Tom and I both attended a dinner last night Sun hosted to mark the first year of OpenSolaris. Stephen Harpster, director of OpenSolaris at Sun, told me that Sun is not trying to take away share from Linux. "We are going for Solaris developers," he said. "People who download OpenSolaris know it has features beyond Linux." Targeting Solaris developers is the natural first step, but why not go after Linux and the lower hanging HP-UX, which Schwartz said in an open letter to HP CEO Mark Hurd should be converged with Solaris 10.
He noted that government and universities who abandoned Solaris and now coming back to the fold with OpenSolaris. Sun has even hired student evangelists, mostly in India and China, Harpster said.
With 5 million licenses in the first years, Tom Goguen, vice president of system software at Sun, said OpenSolaris adoption exceeded expectation, calling it "wildly successful." Most of the Fortune 500 have downloaded OpenSolaris to at least check it out, he said. The big, custom Linux shop Google has downloaded Open Solaris, but Goguen wouldn’t say if the company was a paying customer. In fact, he was unable to quantify the OpenSolaris revenue contributions to Sun, as Tom points out in his post. Apparently, Sun hasn’t broken out those numbers before, which are probably a bit fuzzy given nobody ‘buys’ an OpenSolaris license, and the finance and legal nixed the disclosure.
According to Goguen, among the registered licenses, two-thirds were for x86 systems, with 31 percent Dell, 25 percent on Dell and 24 percent IBM. The rest were on Sun hardware and a few other vendors. In total OpenSolaris is supported on 735 systems, which is more than Red Hat Enteprise Linux 4, Goguen said. Five separate distributions of OpenSolaris have also been launched, some addressing markets Sun hasn’t focused on. Some other numbers:
14,000 registered community members (12,500+ non-Sun, 1,500+ are Sun employees)
39,300 postings to OpenSolaris discussion groups
33,000+ recorded downloads of OpenSolaris source code (actual is probably higher)
30 registered OpenSolaris user groups
440 bugs reported by the community
147 fixed / closed / in progress bugs reported by the community
170 community code contributions offered to OpenSolaris
100 community code contributions integrated into OpenSolaris (putbacks)
Goguen said that one of the biggest challenges is managing the put-backs, dealing with code management processes as the community contributes to the code base, especially with Nevada, the next version of Solaris 10.
See also: Michael Kanellos’ interview with John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
