Sun has launched an all out offensive today against Red Hat Linux, putting Solaris x86 at the tip of its bayonet.
“We are a big supporter of the open source movement and have been forever,” said Larry Singer, SVP of global market strategies at Sun, in an interview. “We think Linux is a huge movement that is pretty good for the industry and that for some implementations Linux makes sense. We also think there are a lot of people that consider Red Hat for the wrong reasons.”
That was one of the more polite things Singer had to say about Red Hat – his comments coming as part of a thwart-Linux push by Sun. Singer spent much of Friday on the phone with journalists, saying that Red Hat costs more than people think, is not as well suited for enterprise tasks as Red Hat claims and is largely inferior to Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system for x86 systems.
Sun insists that the revenue from Lintel boxes comes from the hardware itself. But Red Hat is forcing customers to buy pricey services contracts along with its OS, “which makes Red Hat more expensive than Solaris,” according to Singer. And Sun’s close Linux partner SuSE is not immune from criticism either.
“The reason we are not going after SuSE is because they are not as strong in the US,” Singer said. “They are just not there. SuSE has not become as arrogant with the market because they do not have the dominance that Red Hat has had.”
News source: TheRegister
