I'm certainly not the only one blogging about today's announcement that IBM will distribute and Support Solaris on IBM hardware, after all Jonathan did too. But perhaps I have a different twist from others.

This is a classic case of coopetition, but Sun's cooperating with competitors does not extend to just IBM with Solaris but to many others as well. Specifically with Sun's software infrastructure (aka middleware) we support a wide variety of operating systems and platforms, specifically our Java Composite Application Platform Suite supports AIX, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows and we are committed to doing so going forward and our competitors middleware runs on Solaris (WebLogic, AquaLogic, Fusion, JBoss, WebSphere). And the innovation we are doing around integration in Project Open ESB has binaries even available for Mac OS X (which is great since that's what I use!).

As Jonathan was quoted as saying today, "Our view is when you make your products available on other people's platforms, you just meet more customers, which just gives you more opportunities".