Clueless Sun complains IBM isn’t porting apps to Solaris 10

A small brouhaha is occurring in the business blog space with Sun Microsystems CIO Jonathan Schwartz complaining that IBM is acting in a nasty, proprietary fashion by not immediately jumping on the chance to port its WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products to the new Solaris 10 operating system.

But Jonathan, you aren’t looking at the big picture here. The big picture is that IBM has already aggressively embraced the open standards world — indeed they’re doing more now to promote it than Sun Microsystems is — and their open source platform of choice is the industry standard Linux OS. Not Solaris 10, a Johnny-come-lately in the open source world.

What I find so ironic about this situation is that for all its trumpeting of being the “dot in dot com” and “the network is the computer”, Sun Microsystems has fallen progressively further and further behind the state of the industry. I did a Webcast interview about my best-selling book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts and was candid that the only Unix that causes readers trouble is Solaris 9, which still doesn’t use a standards-compliant shell. Even Apple’s Mac OS X is more standards compatible, and they’re a newcomer to the Unix scene (we’ll all generously forget A/UX as a research project gone horribly wrong, okay?)

I know and have always admired the technological innovations of Sun, first as…

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Sun, Solaris, IBM and the world of Open Source