Re: Is Sun putting much effort into supporting the gcc/binutils

[Andrew Walrond <andrew@walrond.org>]

Hi David,

David Carlton wrote:
> 
> This is true.  I'm not sure how many rounds of layoffs we've had over
> the last five years, but there were many, and I'm not completely sure
> that we're done.
> 
> It's also true that we're not behaving as well as we should in this
> situation.  I've forwarded several messages in this thread to people
> at Sun who might be in a position to make a difference: from where I
> sit, it looks like a situation where having a few of our engineers
> contributing directly to these segments of the open source community
> would help a lot.

Forget 'helping the open source community' and think 'helping Sun'.

I use gnu/linux, primarily on x86_64, which is well supported (kernel
and toolchain) by Intel and AMD. Along comes Sun with some really nice,
competitive new technology (Niagara) which I would love to use, but not
at the time and expense of converting all our our stuff to Solaris, in
which we have no experience, knowledge or know how. Nor are we willing
to lock ourselves into Solaris going forward, since gnu/linux runs on
_everything_ else and leaves our choice of hardware wide open in the future.

And I'll be damned if I am going to bet the farm on a rack of Niagara
servers supported on our OS of choice by _ONE_ enthusiastic 3rd party
developer.

So, bottom line, if you want to sell Niagara product lines to the
gnu/linux market, people like me who are ready and _eager_ to use it,
then step up to the plate with a few developers to help make the
gnu/linux toolchain and kernel every bit as good and supported as the
solaris equivalents.

> 
> But obviously we're not doing a perfect job; in particular, we're
> clearly not doing as good a job on the Sparc + Linux quadrant as we
> should.  Please continue to try to keep us honest, but do so with the
> realization that we're fallible, we're resource-constrained, and we
> can't do everything at once.

I know Sun has had a hard time financially, but having posted revenues
of $13.873 billion for fiscal 2007, the cost of a few developers to open
up the whole gnu/linux market segment for Niagara is down in the noise.

> 
> I am speaking purely as an individual; I am currently employed by Sun,
> and I have a soft spot for GCC (I used to work on GDB before being
> hired by Sun), but my current work is completely unrelated to compiler
> toolchain issues.  (Other than as a user!)  And I have no particular
> influence on Sun's resource allocation or open source behavior.

And I apologise (to everyone) for any unnecessary rhetoric on my part; I
freely admit that I designed my posts specifically to sparc (ahem) this
debate, but I guess most of you knew that already ;)

Andrew Walrond