Sun's Linux Exec Departs

HyperbolicParabaloid writes "The NY Times (free reg blah blah) has an article about the departure of Sun's no.2 exec, but also mentions that Stephen DeWitt, the vice president of an important business unit that leads Sun's efforts with the Linux operating system, quietly left Sun on Friday, the company confirmed today."" And the question is: How will this affect projects like OpenOffice release and the on-again, off-again McNealy Linux relationship.

Comments

If Sun was smart...

[Brian Stretch]

...they'd embrace the upcoming AMD Hammer architecture and build high-end Linux/Hammer workstations and entry- to mid-level servers around them. Kind of a Sun/Linux meets Apple deal: clean product line, not a lot of overlap, well designed, very cool. I say Linux rather than Solaris if only because it's impossible to do Solaris/x86 device drivers for everything, whereas Linux has a decent chance.

Of course, that'd freak out their SPARC people, so they'll never do it. Pity.

But they now have Whitfield Diffie!

[abischof]

They may have lost their Linux Exec, but they recently acquired Whitfield Diffie! (For those not aware, Whitfield Diffie is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the technology used in PGP and elsewhere)