As promised in my Dec. 4, 2007, Solaris vs. RHEL Comparison blog, here is the updated chart, including all of your comments. Like all good open source input, we will continue to update the information on this feature chart as new information comes in, our goal is to make sure the information is factual and correct.
Again, thanks for all of your suggestions. It's great to see how much attention this comparison has received over the last couple of weeks. Special thanks to Jim Laurent for creating and maintaining this document. Both Jim and I were pleasantly surprised and shocked when we read about the chart in Sun Shines In Solaris 10, Linux Comparison, by Charles Babcock, in InformationWeek. Great headline! So, keep those comments coming.
Since Sun supports and sells three enterprise class operating systems, I have also asked Jim to include the features of Microsoft Windows in the chart. As you know, I have always been an open source and open systems advocate, but customer choice is very important and there are a lot of great features in Microsoft Windows. In the past Sun used to be very black and white about software, while HP, and IBM were more shades of gray, supporting their own operating systems and OEMing others. As you know today, Sun OEMs Windows and RedHat, along with open source Solaris. We recognize that customer choice is important, and although we will continue to invest in Open Source Linux and Solaris (along with other open source products like MySQL), you will see us continue to work more and more closely with Microsoft to grow their footprint on our hardware and provide seamless integration between the world of open source and Microsoft.
In many ways, Sun is uniquely positioned to be a bridge between Microsoft and the open source world. We have a patent peace agreement and joint engineering programs between the two companies around virtualization, RDP, SOA, .Net and Java, JVM, directory, identity, data center management, security, and benchmarking (we hold over 20 world record benchmarks running Windows apps on Sun hardware). As a matter of fact, the Sun Federal team has started to have regular meetings with the Microsoft Federal team to see how we can grow business together and service our joint customers better. Expect to see us at each others conferences and even making joint customer calls. This is really a win-win for everyone involved, but most importantly to us, it's a win-win for our customers.
