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.