Why So Anti-Sun?

I really don’t understand why there’s so much anti-Sun sentiment around these days.  I mean, the opensource movement in general just seems to have it in for Sun no matter what they announce or plan it’s either never good enough of there’s some sinister plan behind it.  I don’t get it.  Sun is one of very few big companies who are seriously weighing up the prospects of opensource and seem to generally be finding that opensource can work for them and moving in that direction.  The opensource movement however, far from encouraging this is pulling out all stops in a smear campaign against Sun.

I don’t see how people can miss the fact that Sun is competing directly with RedHat for a lot of business and the fur is flying on both sides.  It’s not like RedHat hasn’t taken its fair share of cheap-shots at Sun and Sun have given as good as they got.  I honestly can’t remember a single time that Sun attacked Linux outside of either technical differences or RedHat.  The closest I can come is in the horrifically biases, predetermined agenda article from NewsForge:

I’ve already mentioned SUSE, but what about community-developed OSes? A skilled sysadmin can take a BSD variant like OpenBSD, or a community-developed GNU/Linux distribution such as Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware, and make it into a powerful server that can compete with Solaris 10. McNealy balked at that notion, saying, "And who will support that? Red Hat won’t support Debian,"

While NewsForge attempts to make out that McNealy’s statement is uninformed or outright FUD, I’d beg to differ.  McNealy understands the enterprise market.  He understands how conservative huge enterprise companies are.  He understands that a minor purchase involves a 9 month sales process and that the company goes through all kinds of checks to make sure that any business they are dealing with isn’t going to go out of business and leave them in the lurch.  All the independent support providers NewsForge pointed out would either have a hard time convincing a major fortune 500 company that they had the infrastructure to provide the support in the first place or convincing them that the company will still be in business in 5-10 years time.  The issue of core server infrastructure is of critical importance to big companies and it’s not taken lightly.  Anyone who thinks that a small unheard of startup is going to have much chance of securing the support contract for the core infrastructure of a fortune 500 company most likely hasn’t dealt with too many major companies.  McNealy is exactly right in his comment – major companies are not going to make their companies dependent on a community group with no support contract, a small company that hasn’t fully demonstrated it’s ability to uphold a major support contract and particularly not in a skilled sysadmin’s pieced together system which noone will understand once that sysadmin leaves.

From that same article is an excellent example of what I’m talking about:

…as though Red Hat only offered one product to fit all situations, and all other GNU/Linux distributions were insignificant.

This is simply putting words into Schwartz’ mouth.  Schwartz made comparisons between Solaris 10 and all it’s major competitors.  "all other GNU/Linux distributions" don’t compete with Solaris to any extent worthy of a mention in such a speech.  It doesn’t mean Schwartz doesn’t know they exist, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t think they’re any good.  It simply means that the marketing figures say they aren’t a threat.  I’ll guarantee that Sun has researched this and is monitoring marketing trends.  If SUSE or Debian suddenly look like they will take significant business away from Sun you can expect to hear about all the weak points in them too.

Perhaps if the opensource movement provided support and constructive comments about how Sun can better embrace the open source movement and why they should take that advice people might find that Sun is actually spending a lot of time listening to the community and really looking hard at the way they do business.  The Java team is definitely putting in a lot of effort in this area and all the indications I’ve seen are that it’s a company wide policy of evaluating how to get the most benefit out of an opensource strategy for the company.