I have been an open source advocate since my time at the DoD. When I was a CTO for the US Army PERSCOM, I was running over 380 Linux servers in production in 1993, when Linux was very young. Everyone thought I was crazy back then, but it worked great as a file server and web server platforms on 486s. I even replaced Solaris with Linux on Sun SPARC 3000s because it was faster than Solaris at the time, that didn't make many friends for me among the Sun sales folks.
In 2000, my wife's career forced me to leave the DoD and move to the west coast. I looked at many companies at the time, and Sun had always been a big open systems supporter. They also seemed to have the "smartest" technical people of all the companies I looked at. I took a job with Sun in 2000 and worked in Sun IT later taking over as Sun's Chief Information Officer.
As soon as I arrived at Sun I started pushing for open source and for Sun to get more involved in Linux. It was not until Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos started pushing along with me that we really got serious about it. I do think we were a little schizophrenic about open source for a while, with all our work on BSD, Apache, Mozilla and Open Office, then on the other side keeping Solaris closed.
That all changed about 2001, and we started internally on the path of open sourcing Solaris, and then later, embraced it all the way across all our products. It took over 5 years to open source Solaris because we had to indemnify every line of code (prove that we wrote it) and / or pay off the companies we licensed it from (we paid out over $200M to make that happen with Solaris).
Today, all our software is either open source (under an OSI approved license) or is in the process of being open sourced. We have committed at the top leadership (Jonathan / Greg / Scott/ Rich Green ) to this direction. We have been committed to this for over 3 years and you can see the proof as we have released Solaris, DTrace, Glassfish, ZFS, Java, Dir.... and we are in the process of open sourcing mail/cal, Identity, and JCAPS. Even our Sun Ray code is going through the open source process.
So at this point, we are completely committed across the company to open source. We are even open sourcing our hardware...you can't get more committed than that.
I would like to see the US Government even more committed to open source than it already is today. Some of them have started building "bonus points" into program RFPs for people that present an open source solution, and I would like to see that across ALL the RFPs. Open source is well established in the Intell and DoD communities because of their concerns about security (open source being more secure), but there are still a lot of IT leaders in other parts of the U.S. government that don't really understand open source or its advantages. I would also like to promote open formats and standards across the Federal government....it's good for security, it's good for the US, and it's good for the tax payers...
Lots of customers ask me about Sun's commitment to open source and Linux. Let me be VERY clear that Sun is completely committed to make sure Linux is supported across our systems and software platforms. All our open source software runs on top of Linux, Solaris, and Windows. And we don't just support one version of Linux, to us "Linux" means Ubuntu, Debian, SuSe, and RedHat.
There are many great things about Linux, and we love to see Linux grow, because it grows open source and choice. However, we also believe there are many great things about Open Source Solaris. Both operating systems are really Unix based, both are open source, both are multi-platform, and both are OEMed by a number a major hardware manufactures. A bunch of our customers have asked me, "OK, if Linux is great and Open Source Solaris is great, how do they compare?" So, let me give you the best information I have on comparing some of the features of both operating systems. I am using RedHat Linux only for comparison, other distributions may have different features. I welcome feedback and "corrections" to the UPDATED chart, as I get them in the comment section of my Blog I will research them and correct them in the table to make sure it is as up to date as possible.
