I regularly read the leading business technology magazine Information Week to get a comprehensive view of the industry. In one article on Linux, Andy Ingram, the VP for Solaris marketing at Sun Microsystems, said "People use Linux for the applications that run on it" only to contradict himself two sentences later by pointing out that all the same applications run on Solaris. He was arguing against the leaders of Solaris technical development, who were pushing to make the operating system open source. He was just as likely defending his stock option interests from the masses of developers, administrators, and businesses who have migrated production functions from Solaris to Linux in the past few years. I have a long history with Sun's operating systems, and have spent the last two years hosting applications on both Solaris and Linux, so I wrote the publication to share my own contrary opinion. They published my letter in a later issue.

Letter to Information Week

While Sun doesn't admit openly to the superiority of Linux performance on machines with less than 8 processors, they have changed their tune somewhat since the publication of my letter. They now release their own version of Linux and even sell Intel-based machines that use it. However, because the software itself is free and open source there is much more to being a successful Linux vendor than releasing a distribution. Businesses like Red Hat focus on integration, service, and support to build customer loyalty through a strong brand. In my experience, Sun charges exorbitantly high premiums for support that they don't actually provide unless you're a big customer with deep pockets, so I don't see them being successful on this front unless they grow a new culture. More importantly, Linux is about freedom of choice, running on more hardware platforms than any other operating system. Sun has stated numerous times that their strategy for software is to leverage it to sell hardware because that's where they make their money. As such, I believe Sun is doing exactly what they have been accusing IBM of doing for the last few years: turning Linux into something proprietary to tie customers in.

There is some evidence. I had good experiences with the Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE family of products, and seeing that they release versions for Red Hat Linux, I intended to use the Sun ONE Directory Server to demonstrate the power of my software. Unfortunately, all Red Hat versions of this product that I have examined have proved to be nothing but uninstallable garbage, and in two years I have yet to see Sun make a single move to support them (note that since I published this page, Sun has withdrawn all Red Hat Linux versions, pledging support with an upcoming v5.2). It may soon be true that Sun acquired software products will only work with Sun platforms that run on Sun hardware. So much for best of breed.

In this venture, I attempted to explicitly partner with Sun. Ultimately that's just meant that they've taken my contact information and some advance copy of my own intellectual property and given me advertisements and lies about returning phone calls in exchange. It's impossible to accurately price their products because they have dozens of discount categories which they use to game you for what you'll pay. Resellers and middlemen have their hands out everywhere in the process, giving you the same uneasy feeling you get at a car dealership. Sun executives always talk about how terrible Microsoft is, but with their firm grip on intellectual property, strategy of hardware lock-in, and inattention to the needs of the common man they are well on the road to losing what little higher ground they may have left. You don't have to take my word for it; the story of their stock price makes the same point.