Whatever pleasantries once existed between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have vanished. This won't come as a shock to many of you. The companies have been jawing in the press for some time. The extent, however, of Sun's loathing for Red Hat is more profound than many imagine, with Sun's CEO Scott McNealy largely confirming a shared attack with Microsoft against the Linux vendor.

McNealy speaking here yesterday at a Northwestern University event on entrepreneurship let the anti-Red Hat venom spurt. The exec rightly presented Red Hat as a serious threat and said Sun has no ill feelings about attacking an open source vendor. This message resonated in a room filled with money-hungry MBAs.

"What's happened now is that the world is down to three operating systems," McNealy said, during his keynote. "That is Windows, Red Hat and Solaris."

"Red Hat is kind of the other pretender there. When we look at Red Hat, we are $400 versus their $2,000 (for the OS) on a four-way server. We have (Solaris) Containers; they don't. We have our worldwide services and support; they have theirs. We have software indemnification versus SCO and Microsoft; they don't. We have NSA-level security . . . We have DTrace . . . We have all kinds of features they don't have."

McNealy continued to say the only thing Red Hat has that Sun doesn't is the open source label on its operating system, which Sun plans to change in the coming months. He also reiterated points about Sun long giving its Solaris code to customers and about Sun's position behind Berkeley as the second leading contributor of open source code on the planet.

But you've heard much of this before. Here's the juicy stuff. The kind of stuff that makes conspiracy theorists drool.

Sun and Microsoft versus mankind

When asked by a Northwestern student why Microsoft decided to make peace with Sun, McNealy drifted into odd territory. His basic claim was that Microsoft knew it needed some competition and that Sun was the lesser of all evils. This claim covers the operating system wars, desktop software and middleware.

"Microsoft needed a partner," McNealy said. "Their customers wanted choice. One is an unstable molecule."

It can only be assumed that McNealy was referring to Linux with that last comment. Sadly, he moved away from the molecular analysis at that point.

"Who else are they going to choose as their second source? You know, Sun and Microsoft aren't that competitive. We don't do MSN, we don't do Xbox, we don't do applications. They don't do computers, storage or infrastructure."

"They weren't going to do it with Larry (Oracle). They weren't going to do it with IBM. They can't stand IBM. They at least respect us. They really don't like IBM. And they hate the GPL."

Following these comments, McNealy went on to describe something verging on a symbiotic relationship between Microsoft and Sun centered around competition. Sun's StarOffice software and Linux desktop provide a welcome foil to Microsoft's desktop dominance, he said. Customers want to feel like they have two, solid options to pick from when considering deals. So just having Sun around makes Microsoft seem less threatening to its clients. Better Sun be knocking on the door rather than Red Hat or IBM.

McNealy vowed that unprecedented work is being done to make all of Microsoft and Sun's software compatible. "Unfortunately, (our stuff) won't interoperate with IBM very well," he joked. The Sun chief then closed by saying the Sun and Microsoft partnership could be one of the biggest and most significant deals "in the last few years, if we are successful."

To say the least, times have changed. It's hard to gauge if McNealy is simply hyping up Sun's efforts or if there is real meat behind the talk. This, however, was the first time in our memory that such a drastic Sun and Microsoft versus the world position has been presented. Isn't it supposed to be mankind versus Microsoft?

The Red Terror

There should be little doubt that much of Sun's current push is a result of what it sees as weakness in the Linux market. Red Hat once appeared as the selfless leader of the open source community, fighting the big boys for the betterment of all. Linux zealots need to realize that this is no longer the case. Red Hat is a money-grubbing business just like Sun, Microsoft and IBM. It's out for blood - not peace and love.

While Linux has obvious benefits over Windows and Solaris in some instances, it does not have a company the size of Microsoft or Sun behind it from a pure operating system standpoint. Microsoft and Sun know they can attack Red Hat's limited resources and create doubts around its product and the company's support.

"We love Linux, we love community development and we love open source," McNealy told The Register in an interview. "We just don't like Red Hat."

When asked if Sun would possibly acquire SCO in a bid to gain open source goodwill, McNealy responded, "We think we are the good guys. Who has donated more code than us? IBM keeps donating end-of-life code - remnants of roadkill they've bought. We are open-sourcing Solaris. OpenOffice.org is one of the most important efforts on the planet. I would hardly argue that we need to go off and spend a big bag of money and do more for the community."

"I may sound defensive, but I don't feel defensive at all about our open source community development."

So why such a verbal beef with Red Hat?

"They are a competitor. They are a for-profit company that is trying to make money with a very proprietary strategy that locks out the rest the community."

You guys say that a lot. What specifically is proprietary?

"Well, they are proprietary when the apps are certified only to their environment. If it was truly write once, run anywhere, everyone would feel comfortable they could buy another operating system and run enterprise software. Customers can't do that."

How is that different to Sun certifying applications for Solaris?

"I didn't say that Solaris was a write once, run anywhere kind of environment. You do certify to Solaris and certify in the enterprise space."

"Look, that doesn't make Red Hat bad. It just makes them the enemy. It is not religious. It's economic. We charge $400 for Solaris one- to four-way servers; they charge $2,000. We have a faster IP stack than they do, we have containers, we will give you software indemnification; they won't."

"I can run Red Hat apps in a Solaris container. They can run Red Hat apps on a Red Hat kernel at way higher cost, way higher risk, with worse support and way less scalability."

"The one feature they had, which is a marketing feature, is they can claim they were open source. Well, we are going to take away that marketing check-in-the-box."

Why don't you indemnify Linux on the server instead of just the desktop?

"We have indemnified Linux apps running on the server. It's called Solaris."

"Am I going to indemnify a for profit company's IP. Am I going to indemnify Red Hat? That's a competitor. Am I doing to indemnify IBM? That's a competitor. I don't know where their code from, where they got it. I don't know how well they treat it."

"Why don't they all step in and take the Java hit (with Kodak) )?"

Not surprisingly, McNealy was up to his old tricks during the rest of the interview, bashing Microsoft software's virus and spam problems with relentless fury.

Is Sun more in bed with Microsoft than ever before? Maybe, but so what?

There simply isn't a conspiracy between Sun, Microsoft and SCO to kill Linux. There is a business plan to thwart Red Hat. This should not shock anyone. It should be expected.

Red Hat has warm, fuzzy feelings behind it, but it is not the open source community as a whole. It's a company every bit as aggressive as the next. Sun and Microsoft are trying to make this point painfully clear. They're not in love with each other as Red Hat's Michael Tiemann has suggested. They simply have a common enemy. ®

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