The Linux jihad against SUN

So OpenSolaris is out and its struck a raw nerve in the most unlikely community. Linux!!. The new opensource Bin Laden is not ex and current monopolies IBM and Microsoft but the company that created the open systems space in the IT industry - Sun Microsystems. The GPL and linux folks are suddenly feeling the heat on both the technical, intellectual and moral leadership that they had staked out. SUN has taken the legal jujitsu GPL performed for copyrights and extended it to the realm of software patents via the CDDL, a license bundled with a patent grant that seems to have actually achieved a successful legal tightrope act between the extremes of GPL open sourcing and proprietary commercial software development.Current use of opensource esp. GPL in IT has a very nod nod wink wink character to it. What CDDL provides is a sounder operational and legal framework to the use of opensource in corporate IT. Sun is obviously hoping its OpenOffice magic will work for OpenSolaris as well.

Sun has taken a 500 million dollar investment in bleeding edge OS technologies and opensourced it via OpenSolaris. Linux supporters see its existence as a life and death survival issue for their OS since it undercuts (and some would argue goes beyond) the economic , legal and free(as in libre) benefits offered by Linux today. Some of the FUD coming out of the Linux community would have done the Microsoft Get the facts campaign proud. Its one thing for usual trolls to declare their faith on slashdot or for /. editors to drive up page views by portraying conflict where none is needed, but when the intellectual leaders of the community such as Bruce Perens and Linus get into the FUD act, it signifies a moral climbdown that should have Bill Gates rubbing his hands in glee. I guess you become your enemy is a truism that is fascinating to watch as the Linux community led by Red Hat adopts Microsoft's 'take no prisoners' ,'cut off the air supply' scorched earth FUD policy against SUN. All very curious since Michael Tiemann Red Hat CTO is the vice president of OSI which approved the CDDL license.

Sun has always had a Lone Ranger attitude in the IT, going against conventional thinking, pundits, Wall Street analysts, and competitors. Whether it was RISC workstations in the 80s, Unix servers(at a time when IBM, HP et al were preaching the Gospel according to Bill Gates) in the 90's, multicore/mulithreaded Niagara chips( instead of Ghz mania) for next generation processors, Java in application development or taking on Microsoft legally(and winning) they've stood their ground no matter how irrational it seemed to everybody else. A lesser public company would have succumbed and changed course in short order long before the vision translated to reality.

Fortunately for SUN management its board, investors and technologists seem to have the same contrarian streak in them. Next to Apple, SUN has one of the most fanatic user communities in Solaris and Java. It has resulted in Java becoming the defacto standard in corporate IT and mobile development. It should be interesting to watch how the OpenSolaris move plays out. Based on their past record I would not bet against them.