How Happy Is Sun Now?
I haven't paid a great deal of attention to the WWDC keynote details - just sampled the various discussions going on. I was however interested in a comment by Ted Leug that Apple were including DTrace in Apple's performance tools.
I wonder what Sun think about this. DTrace was a key Solaris feature and now it's coming out for OS X and I seem to recall mention of projects that are porting it to Linux. As a developer it's nice to see your code become popular so the DTrace team are probably thrilled. As a company though, it's hard to leverage the benefit of your investment when everyone else is reaping the benefits. Even if Sun get improvements back from Apple, where's the benefit for them? Apple and everyone else have those improvements too. The ubiquity argument of Java doesn't seem to apply here, you don't build on top of DTrace, you use it as a debugging tool. The support business model probably doesn't pan out either - Apple will be providing support for it themselves and they're the experts on DTrace on OS X, not Sun.
Overall, I can see benefit to Sun in open sourcing Solaris - the ubiquity and support business models have potential for the OS as a whole, but the ability to pinch key advantages of that OS and port them to other OS's seems to be a boon for Solaris competitors. Then again, is Sun really competing in the OS market or are they just using Solaris and Linux to sell their server hardware? Most likely, they don't stand to lose a lot of Solaris gradually dies off, as long as their hardware runs the OS that takes over from it.
That said, clearly this is a boon for OS X developers so you won't hear me complaining about it.
August 10th, 2006 at 12:55 am
Why wonder? Go right to the source, Bryan Cantrill, author of dtrace:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc?entry=dtrace_on_mac_os_x
August 10th, 2006 at 8:52 am
Thanks for pointing that out. It is still the opinions of the developers - they’re definitely happy, though it does suggest that Sun helped Apple out with the port and were quite happy about it.
August 10th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Hi Adrian.
my initial reaction is that the business people would also be happy. By having the tool more widespread it will encourage other people to use it and enhance it in various ways that the original development team couldn’t do or even think about.
The downside to this as you allude to is that you think DTrace is so fantastic that it would help Sun sell more machines, and by having it run on FreeBSD/Mac and further down the line linux this will hurt their sales.
I don’t think so.. I think the main sales push for sun is their power utilization story… buy sun as it can serve pages for less power.. and power is the hot-topic in todays datacenters.. DTrace wouldn’t even get mentioned as unfortunately sys-admins tools have little importance when it comes down to choosing what hardware to run.
1 metric is important — cost of running the hardware.
August 10th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Yeah good point Ian. The power story coupled with the we sell hardware story makes anything that gets Sun attention a good thing - including (especially?) inventing a really useful utility that’s been ported to other OSs.
August 10th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Honestly, we couldn’t be happier that DTrace is showing up in places like Mac OS X and FreeBSD — and it’s a virtual certainty that that’s an opinion shared throughout Sun all the way up to Jonathan. It represents a success of open source and specifically of OpenSolaris. Sun wasn’t going to convert Mac OS X developers to Solaris easily (all due respect to Jeff Waugh and co., but gnome ain’t Aqua) — this will expose developers to DTrace so when it’s time to choose a platform to deploy on, Solaris might be that much more appealing :-)
August 11th, 2006 at 7:33 am
Adam,
Great to hear Sun’s so happy with it. The develop on OS X and deploy on Solaris line of reasoning is another really good reason porting DTrace helps Sun. I’m glad I asked this one - lots of stuff I hadn’t thought about.
Thanks.