One thing that I think enabled HP, Dell, IBM and even Sun to adopt Linux is its comparative neutrality. IBM's OS/2 by comparison was definitely not a neutral product. Do you think that Solaris is going to achieve the same level of neutrality as Linux?
First of all, it seems incongruous to call Linux one thing. [In market share charts] we've now broken Unix out into Solaris and HP-UX and AIX. That hasn't happened in Linux yet, even though that's already happened in the marketplace because there is a dominant player, Red Hat. You have to look at how many users Red Hat has, not how many Linux has. So when you assert that Linux is neutral, Red Hat is not neutral.
I agree that Red Hat is not neutral, but I take some issue with that. I think the overall project of Linux still is a valid entity to talk about. It might not be what I get on a CD-ROM and install in my computer, but given where the bits in that CD-ROM come from, I think it is legitimate still to talk about Linux as an entity.
So, number one, Solaris is now officially platform-neutral. There is an open source license under which you will be managed. Gentoo OpenSolaris will be available. My belief is that there'll be another 10 or so [non-Sun OpenSolaris] distributions that will emerge.
And I suspect the company that will benefit the most from OpenSolaris will probably be not IBM or Dell, but Sun, which perhaps is why I think it's not considered a neutral product.
And I think when IBM acquires either Red Hat or Novell, I think the scales will fall from peoples' eyes and they'll also realise that neither of them are neutral. I believe that Solaris will be a platform-neutral operating system. I think it is up to us to prove that neutrality with the governance model. But a lot of the contributions that Cisco and Dell and Topspin are making [to Linux] are drivers. They'll also make them available for open source Solaris.
I think the dominant beneficiary right now of Linux is Red Hat. Does that mean Linux is neutral? Red Hat has the branded relationship with the customer, so Red Hat is more in charge right now of Linux in North America than Linus is.
