Who is the most possible embracer to open OS?
From the birth of computer hardware, OS software had experienced three big steps. Firstly, OS was a supplement to computer for customers to drive the hardware. They were copied from person to person without any limitations. Then, many proprietary OSs were developed by special companys. These software are released under certain copyrights and are closed source usually. Now, more and more software were open sourced to customers. The software owner release their source to end user. GNU has Linux, while SUN has open Solaris. Does the end user really need these code which are composed by millions of lines? The answer is obvious not. They will not care what is the code under the OS if they are only interested in using them. Then who the most possible embracer of the OSs with source code. Let's look at the current situation of the industry. As we have known, M$ acquire more and more IT market by their closed source windows. Their OSs are so dominate that the hardware vendors must pay M$ to verify their hardware because no one will by the hardware not compatable with windows. As a result, hardware vendors are losing their power and profit silently because they must obey the same monarch. It is a complete subversion to the time when customer paid much money for the hardware and got their OSs freely, at least it was what they thought. In order to change this unbalance, hardware vendors need an OS which conforms to an open standard. Also, they would like to give their voices on how the OS will evolve in the future. There is no difficulty to guess the hardware vendors are applauding hard behind the open OSs.
Then, does "open" mean everything that the hardware vendors want? However, the fact is far from what we expect. The top hardware vendors like IBM seems show more interests on Linux than Open Solaris. From their perspectives, Open Solaris was controlled by an potential hardware opponents. To them, it is like a party, very attractive but they don't know when the host will ask them to pay for attending the party.
