Economist article on Sun's Linux Strategy

DavidNWelton writes "The Economist has a well-written article about Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and his Linux strategy. It also mentions Microsoft, and the SCO lawsuit."

Comments

Re:Your second point

[Miguel de Icaza]

Sun is taking measures to provide source code under their community license, That doesn't matter quite as much as M$ releasing the Windos source because Sun doesn't deliberately hide their better APIs for internal use nor use deliberalely incompatible interfaces.Solaris is an open system, you don't -need- the source code. Sun has not, say, modified the way their CDE or NFS or DNS or X11 or POSIX implementation works to prevent other people's software from working with it, which a certain OTHER company has as a nasty history of ...

Sun has a history of being open with their stuff. The SPARC architecture is downloadable off the web, ferchrissakes, and there are many Sun clone vendors . Their hardware division actively works with other companies to help them port to SPARC, which was why everything and its brother ran on Sun machines in the early 90s. Their NFS protocol was documented and now used by pretty much everything. Sun machines can also use DNS and other non-Sun resolvers just as well as Sun's own NIS system.

On the other hand, there is this OTHER company who deliberately does not release documentation to outside developers, deliberately obfuscates how their stuff works, breaks other people's protocols or refuses to use them (can you completely replace NetBIOS name resolution with DNS ... I only wish. Can you replace the NTLM Domain crap?).