Sun Micro gives it away?

Well its a little early to start comparing them to the whore of Babylon just yet. Sun announced they plan to opensource all their software and sell support for it. This may or may not be a good idea. For some companies this is working out well so far, however what happens as support competition sets in? Much like the aftermarket repairs sucked business dollars from dealerships at a lower cost so will it be with software. Service was a back end cash flow generator not the sole source of income for manufacturers. Sun will have to be developing and problem solving faster than the opensource community can and that won't happen. As for their hardware business that will be lost as well if they can't beat Dell on price and quality simulataneously. While Sun truly has some great products they are somewhat misguided in thinking that they won't have any service competition. Sun also has the habit of exciting the opensource community to only dash hopes that they are really dedicated to the cause by following up their bold announcements with the now infamous, We have to change the GPL now!( ...so we can make tons of money of it) type lashing out statements. Crying that the GPL must be changed but it would only benefit them. I suspect we will hear more of the same retehoric in the next few days. If they would take the blinders off and finally look at things as a whole rather than just how to survive then maybe they could strategize better.

Linux gains ground

Finally there is some movement in the scene. Companies are starting to realize that they have been wasting their efforts by not partnering on projects. Several Debian based distros are working together now to build a good enterprize package with the Debian Sarge release and include Red Hat interportability. About time! While 2006 will not be the year of the Linux desktop it will most likely be the year of the most significant gains since there were GUI's developed for Linux. Command line interfaces will continue to lessen and the leverage Microsoft had will continue to wane. Apple is an interesting variable in the mix though. Going to Intel is a security risk but may make them competative with PCs on price. I recently looked at Debian and it is getting to the point where it is almost as good in quality as the for profit distros. The for profits need to focus more attention on the originating formats to hasten Linux into a more commercialy viable alternative. Sure they can charge for it but Red Hat has the right idea in selling support rather than developing code.