What was the long term fall out of this? Sell out to Oracle, etc. On 2007-08-28 Tue 10:43 AM |, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 04:08:02PM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote: > > > On 28/08/07, Craig Skinner - Sun Microsystems - Linlithgow - Scotland > > > > Yay! Action at last. > > > > > > Wow! This is great news. > > > > Better late than never, but damn is it late. > > Indeed, that is the correct sentiment regarding Sun's action here. > > The facts of the industry are simply this: Approximately 95% of > machine parts are documented (whether they are documented well or not > is a totally seperate question). > > Starting roughly around 1990, Sun put themselves on the path of > supplying only the absolute minimum documentation for their machine > parts. Meanwhile, the PC really took off, and all the documentation > for PC parts has always been out there (minus a few special cases that > we have had to fight for). DEC released pretty much all the > documentation for the Alpha right from the start, and later a few > people pressured HP to release pretty much all the HPPA documentation. > > That left the largest straggler in the industry: Sun. And the case is > that Sun has always had the documentation in-house; because of solid > engineering principles in-house they document everything, perhaps > because their hardware and software groups are seperated so much. > > Apple also has done a poor job of documenting their hardware, but > looking at the quality of their hardware (with entirely pointless > divergences between models that come out 3 months apart) we can guess > that maybe we don't want to see them. > > Finally, there are a few American chip makers that resist the status > quo, like Marvell and (to a lesser degree) Broadcom. Even Intel tries > to play the open game now. Then there are a handful of (increasingly > irrelevant) American wireless chipset manufacturers. But in general > there are fewer and fewer closed vendors. > > But Sun had no excuse for this behaviour in 1990, and it is incredible > that only now they will try to redeem it. So I don't say bravo, but I > say "about time". They don't get any points from me, because they are > so late. > > I give the most credit to Craig Skinner who started the conversation > at Sun with us (he found the right place to push Sun -- right at the > top), and David Gwynne for continuing the soft pressure through the > last couple of months. > > My biggest hope is that Sun's cleanup process does not delete too much > information from the pages... like descriptions of hardware bugs and > the workarounds needed for "best effort" operation. Because we > already know that some revisions of Sun hardware have brutally bad > bugs that ... even sometimes cannot be worked around.
