Is Sun subverting Linux from the inside?

Butler, meanwhile, believes that, although Sun is keen not to be viewed as waging war with the wider open source community, it is, nonetheless, trying to drive a wedge between it and the Linux world.

"It doesn't want to be saddled with the baggage of being seen as a rabid anti-open source vendor, although personally I think it will be seen that way. Taking on Linux is an incredibly dangerous strategy, but while it will be difficult to stem the bleeding and stop defection, Sun will give it a damn good try," Butler says.

The vendor's aim is to show that "we do Linux better than Linux" and it will, therefore, emphasise the fact that, as a result of its Project Janus initiative, Solaris 10 can run native Linux binary applications without any changes being required and without customers and developers having the "aggravation of learning a new OS".

"Sun still has an enormous portfolio of applications and it wants to change most of them into native x86 ones," Butler explains. The challenge here is that, up until a couple of years ago, Solaris was both a key target platform for ISVs and "the development OS of choice", but has now moved to being "a significant port".

But, while Sun is keen to "reawaken some developers' loss of commitment", in practice, the world has moved on, with the focus no longer being on which OS to write to, but on which over-arching development framework fits requirements best.

Today, this choice boils down to Microsoft's .Net or Sun's Java, but the Java community tends to use Linux rather than Solaris as its underlying OS.

"It's pretty hard. The value of Java is in the notion that it is OS-independent, so there's a danger that Sun will be seen as a bit hypocritical if it pushes Solaris too hard here," Butler points out.

But Sun is also taking another tack to woo developers -- and customers -- over. It is pitching the notion that tools and utilities such as workload management are more functionally-rich and mature in the Solaris world than in the Linux one. "Sun's view is that Linux is building its credentials here, but it's weak, whereas it can give the best of both worlds," Butler explains.

Also inherent in the binary compatibility message, however, is the idea of scalability. "Sun is saying that you can run your Linux or Solaris application on a Solaris-based Opteron machine, but as it grows you can also stick it on a giant system. The problem is that people have been scaling down, not up," says Ingle.

Another challenge that Sun faces here is winning ISVs such as Oracle over to endorsing their Linux-based applications on Solaris machines. "ISVs are notoriously risk-averse and cautious about making glib guarantees of support. Sun is going to have its work cut out convincing them that Linux binaries will run without the slightest change, but if it can't convince them, the strategy will ultimately fail," Butler says.

While he believes that Solaris over time will become a "viable" x86 OS, he is not convinced that success here will lead to growth in Sun's overall Solaris-based revenues.

"Though Sun will gain a degree of sales on x86, it will come at the expense of its traditional Sparc business. It says that sales on x86 will be totally incremental, but we don't buy it. We believe there will be some attrition of the Sparc base and in 2009, Solaris sales will be little, if any, higher than today," Butler says.