Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

The Guardian: “Will Sun’s Solaris put Linux in the Shade”

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2075543,00.html

Not surprisingly, Linux hackers are distinctly unimpressed by the idea. For example, David Miller, one of the most senior Linux coders and the person who led work to get Linux to run on Sun’s Sparc processor in the mid 1990s, is dismissive: “The only tangible consequence of opening up Solaris has been that now everyone can watch how glacial the pace of Solaris development is compared to Linux.”

The creator of Linux and overall leader of its development, Linus Torvalds, is also untroubled by the prospect of Sun competing in this space: “I actually think that Linux is simply technically superior,” he says, “and that it does a lot of things that OpenSolaris will probably never do, but I don’t even think that that is Sun’s real problem. The real problem is psychological.” He goes on to offer an interesting analysis of the larger issues involved.

Least of their problems

“I get the feeling that Sun thinks that they lost customers to Linux because their customers wanted ‘another licence’, which is just silly. They didn’t lose their customers to Linux really over the licence, but over the emergent secondary effects of the licence – the fact that suddenly their customers could choose their hardware freely, and their support and [operating system] suppliers freely too.

“I think the licence is the least of their problems,” he says. “The company culture is a lot harder to change. The licence is there to just say ‘you cannot compete by hiding the source code, you really have to compete on your own merits’, but it doesn’t really limit things in any other way. Is Sun really going to try to bolster that kind of competition? Somehow, I don’t see it, and that’s the ‘company culsture’ part.”