"More Linux Means More Solaris"
Sun CTO Papadopoulos Holds Forth On Linux
varbusiness.com
VARBusiness: How important is Linux to Sun today and going forward?
Papadopoulos: This is simple for us. Sun Solaris is 100 percent Unix. Linux is a Unix phenomenon. The more Linux, the greater the demand for Unix, and the greater the number of developers, administrators and users that are skilled in Unix. The icing for us is that Solaris runs Linux applications while being far more scalable, enterprise-ready and professionally supported. So, more Linux means more Solaris, and a greater pool of skilled Unix talent throughout the industry.
VB: Some describe Linux as an NT killer. How serious a threat is Linux to NT?
Papadopoulos: The sweet spot of NT server and Linux are precisely the same: 1-to-4 way Intel-based workgroup and Web servers. And Linux is widely viewed as more stable and efficient in this space.
Linux has considerably further to go to challenge the software capture of Windows on the desktop. But here is a provocative experiment I performed recently. I wiped the disk of a new laptop and rebuilt it COMPLETELY from the Internet. I downloaded the latest and greatest Linux from Red Hat, Communicator from Netscape, Java2 JDK from Sun, Emacs from GNU, and Star Office from Star Division. So, I can do Web, mail, collaboration, Java software development and personal productivity on an incredibly stable and completely up-to-date system.
If I were running a company whose main profits were derived from selling software that is functionally equivalent to what I just freely downloaded over the Internet, well, I would be wondering precisely what was keeping me in business.
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