Ed Moltzen

The Chart

June 13, 2007

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz is defending his company's actions in the Linux community, hours after Linux creator Linus Torvalds ripped Sun for taking but not giving back to the open source universe.

Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, took the first shot by accusing Sun of making use of technology put forth by Linux developers but not reciprocating with anything of value.

They not only drool after our drivers, they drool after all the _people_who write drivers. They'd love to get kernel developers from Linux, they see that we have a huge amount of really talented people. So they want to talk things up, and the more "open source" they can position themselves, the better.

They may release the uninteresting parts under some fine license. See the OpenSolaris stuff -- instead of being blinded by the code they _did_ release under an open source license, ask yourself what they did *not* end up releasing. Ask yourself why the open source parts are not ready to bootstrap a competitive system, or why they are released under licenses that Sun can make sure they control.

Torvalds' remark about Sun wanting to hire Linux talent may be a reference to the company's appointment earlier this year of Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock as its chief operating systems platform strategist.

After ripping the company, Torvalds writes, "I'm not at all berating Sun, what I'm trying to do here is wake people up who seem to be living in some dream-world where Sun wants to help people."

Schwartz responded almost immediately on his blog:

Linus,

First, I'm glad you give credit to Sun for the contributions we've made to the open source world, and Linux specifically - we take the commitment seriously. It's why we freed OpenOffice, elements of Gnome, Mozilla, delivered Java, and a long list of other contributions that show up in almost every distro. Individuals will always define communities, but Sun as a company has done its part to grow the market - for others as much as ourselves.

But I disagree with a few of your points. Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work. I draw a very sharp distinction - even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture.

Schwartz offers this olive branch: "But most of all, from where I sit, we should put the swords down - you're not the enemy for us, we're not the enemy for you. Most of the world doesn't have access to the internet - that's the enemy to slay, the divide that separates us."

He invited Torvalds over for dinner.

Though it didn't get a mention during Sun's last quarterly earnings conference call with financial analysts, Linux continues to be a growing portion of the system company's portfolio.