James Todd, Sun, and Linux (Shallow Thoughts)

James Todd, Sun, and Linux

A Sun employee named James Todd has been posting paeans to Sun and their Linux support on the svlug list (the thread). I don't intend to follow up to that thread, because I expect after 18 messages in four days (including 9 from jwtodd spanning over 800 lines) I expect most folks on the list would prefer to move on to other topics.

James attacks me repeatedly for my earlier blog entry wherein I say that the machines I saw in the Sun booth were all running Windows. He says he worked in the booth, and there were no Windows machines there.

If that's true, then that's terrific! I'm very happy to hear that all the machines I saw with "Start" menus and Redmond-looking icons and themes were actually just a theme Sun puts on their Linux (or Solaris?) desktop boxes. I don't know why Sun feels it necessary to make Linux look just like Windows -- maybe that's part of their theory that you don't need to know what OS you're on (which is really quite a good idea for corporate installations, and reportedly is working quite well internally at Sun). Perhaps they further assume that if they make the non-Windows installations look like Windows, people will be more accepting of the idea. I'm not sure this part is a good idea -- wouldn't it be better if the theme sent the message "Sun" rather than "Windows", so customers don't get the idea that they can just zip off to Dell or somewhere and buy cheaper machines that will do the same thing? Wouldn't it be better marketing at a show like Linux World to show off a theme that didn't look like Windows?

But that's all marketing. If the machines were in fact running Linux and Solaris, I'm happy to hear that I was wrong. Time will tell whether the Windows-like theme is the choice, and whether Sun sticks with Linux in the long run. Of course I hope they do, and that they succeed in selling linux boxes to corporate customers, and that the recent settlement agreement with Microsoft does not herald a withdrawal from open source, as it has with some other companies.

(Whether Sun has helped open source is not at issue, and never was part of this debate, as far as I know. They've already contributed quite a bit, with the Open Office project, and with contributions to Gnome and Mozilla accessibility and internationalization.)

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld, marketing
[ 14:29 Aug 10, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]