August 16th, 2006
IBM trash talking on Sun's OpenSolaris
Stephen Shankland reports on remarks by Dan Frye, the IBM executive in charge of its Linux Technology Center. Frye characterized OpenSolaris as an open source facade, with Sun not sharing control of it with outsiders. "It’s a facade. There’s lots of marketing, but no community to speak of," he said. Sun, of course, points to 119 code contributions from outsiders and 40 projects related to OpenSolaris, and the fact that Sun is planning to open source every piece of code, including reference implementations for processors, it has developed.
It’s telling that IBM’s philosophy and support for open source is conditional. Scott Handy, senior vice president for Linux and open source at IBM, makes the statement that there is no point in making AIX (IBM’s Unix) open source in Shankland’s story. "There’s room for a proprietary one and an open one. Once one is open, you don’t need any more," he said. My question is who made up that rule–you need only one open and one closed operating system? That just doesn’t seem credible or even logical. Is this a rule at IBM, and what IBM tells it customers? Who just needs just one open and one closed operating system…or app server or ERP system or processor architecture?
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
