Sun Goes To Standard Linux
Sun’s
Linux strategy sometimes appears to be a bit less planned than one
might expect from a multi-billion dollar systems vendor.
When
Sun entered the Linux desktop market last year they couldn’t
tell us whose Linux they’d be using.
Then it turned out they’d be doing their own distribution
– which seemed strange, since almost no one sees the point of
creating additional complexity in the Linux market and there are
plenty of standard distributions to choose from.
(In fact, Sun eventually admitted it was shipping Red
Hat’s Linux, with some unique Sun additions.)
But
last week Sun changed its mind.
Apparently bowing to customers’ wishes, Sun will now
choose a partner (or partners) from among the standard Linux
players and stop offering its own brand of Linux.
We’d assume they’d choose Red Hat (since they use it
already) and either United Linux or SuSE (the largest of the
United Linux partners).
Read
between the lines and you’ll see that Sun is still hoping that
customers will prefer using Solaris (on SPARC or x86) as its
operating system of choice. Sun
is up to knocking the ability of Linux applications to run
smoothly across the Linux distributions and claiming that
they’ll run better on Solaris.
I guess we should say we’ll wait and see.
Apparently
Sun hasn’t figured out that some customers have decided that
they prefer Linux and that proprietary UNIX platforms (like
Solaris) are just not what they want to buy.
We think Sun has had a lot of trouble hearing that message.
But
Sun, if you really want to be in the software business (and not in
the business of using your software as a way to sell customers
SPARC hardware), you should be relatively indifferent as to
operating systems, as long as you can support them.
Selling and supporting great software on any platform is a
good business. You
do, however, have to decide that it’s your business.
So
we’re wondering, what is your real Linux strategy?
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