Looks like Sun and Red Hat have really been in some heated ’stuff’ lately. According the The Jem Report, there seems to be a lot of mud slinging going back and forth between Sun and Red Hat.

For instance, ‘Red Hat is not Linux’? What’s up with that? I really hate to see the Linux community get into this smearing rubbish. Rest assured I am not going to let this slide just because they are non-Microsoft companies. Matt is all done with the hype, mud slinging and just being stupid in general. Any tech company that thinks that it is OK to start up silly rumors about each other can rest assured that they will not receive my business.

Sun Microsystems head honchos Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz often equate Red Hat with all of GNU/Linux. After interviewing both of them on Monday during the day-long Solaris 10 launch event in San Jose, I understood their frame of reference on this matter and many others much more clearly. For the first time in several releases, Solaris is actually a threat to the other players in the operating system market, but Sun’s market outlook and publicity strategy may be working against the merits of Solaris 10.

The day began with a presentation outlining the new features of Solaris 10 and how this latest release of Sun’s flagship operating system stacks up to HP/UX (”a dead operating system” according to Jonathan Schwartz), AIX (”a dying operating system,” Schwartz quipped — I was the only person in the theater who laughed), Windows 2003, and something labeled “Red Hat,” as though Red Hat only offered one product to fit all situations, and all other GNU/Linux distributions were insignificant.