"We are a big supporter of the open source movement and have been forever," said Larry Singer, SVP of global market strategies at Sun, in an interview. "We think Linux is a huge movement that is pretty good for the industry and that for some implementations Linux makes sense. We also think there are a lot of people that consider Red Hat for the wrong reasons."
He went on to say that Linux is not free and stuff like that. Why is SUN so anti-Linux? Because it takes away from its sales. SUN really has to figure out what it is going to do about Linux, it is a much bigger problem for them than Microsoft. Bill can always sell MS Linux and also sell MS Office for Linux when the open source people do a find and replace with Microsoft’s “monopoly“. (Can’t wait to see the EU sue Red Hat). Bill can also port .NET to Linux and VS .NET and developers will write lots of MS centric stuff for MS Linux.
SUN can’t really sell that much. Technically they are a hardware and chips company. They can try selling Java, since they have such a tight control over it. Also Linux takes away from big expensive SUN servers much more than it takes away from Windows 2003 server.
So SUN is not really on our side. Microsoft is more combative with Linux in its rhetoric and it is a “war” according to Steve Ballmer, but the first major casualty of this war will be SUN Microsystems. MS has more to gain from Linux, SUN has everything to lose.
