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Inside the Linux arcana

Tags:
Agreement,
Court,
Unix,
Linux

David Berlind ZDNet.com

Published: 17 Mar 2004 15:25 GMT

To be clear, we might never know whether Sun went to Utah to scare SCO, to indirectly underwrite its legal endeavours, or simply to "clean up" things. But, whereas Linux's continued availability under the GPL or lack thereof (a fate which most certainly will be determined by the outcome of the SCO case) is relevant to the future of Linux distributors like Red Hat, Sun's Schwartz implied in an email exchange with me that the case and its outcome have no bearing on Sun's decision-making or it plans to win with Solaris.

The reason Schwartz appears to have no interest in the case is because he claims that Solaris x86 isn't competing against an army of GPL-emboldened Linuxes. Instead, given Red Hat's overwhelming dominance on the enterprise Linux front, Schwartz says Solaris is competing against Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Indeed, according to IDC, Red Hat is the dominant supplier of Linux servers, coming in with more than a 60 percent share of the market. According to Schwartz, between RHEL's lack of binary compatibility with other Linux distributions, the overwhelming demand for it, and the fact that Red Hat now charges for it, the GPL has been neutralised from both the enterprise buyer's point of view as well as from Sun's competitive point of view. As far as he's concerned, the business playing field has been levelled and he's competing with an operating system that might as well be proprietary. Red Hat apparently sees the same thing in reverse, viewing the Unix operating system as the company's main competition.

Against that sort of competitor, and armed with Sun's engineering resources as well as a new licensing scheme, Schwartz is confident that Sun can win, GPL or no-GPL. "We're continuing to invest in our OS, Solaris -- running on Opteron, Intel and Sparc," said Schwartz. "So we've got a lot more flexibility to continue driving improvements, and price/performance. That's why you'll see Solaris on x86 systems priced lower than Red Hat." To address Red Hat's subscription model, Schwartz said, "soon, we'll announce a subscription-based pricing model that will allow you to compare apples to apples with Red Hat."

The outcome of the SCO case and whether the GPL is bound or unbound from Linux may indeed be immaterial to the Sun's game plan. But, I'm not certain that Sun wouldn't be just as happy to nudge Red Hat off the cliff if it got close to the edge. I'm reminded of the fact that Schwartz was the one who pointed out Red Hat's 10-Qs to me when I asked whether Red Hat was the canary in SCO's coalmine.

In the sections that address SCO, those 10-Qs make it clear that Red Hat might be unable to continue selling its products if they could no longer be distributed under the GPL. Schwartz may indeed be confident that it can beat Red Hat and its hardware partners if the GPL remains bound to Linux. But, I find it hard to believe that he and other Sun executives wouldn't be downright giddy if SCO prevailed and Red Hat subsequently imploded.

Of course, this is all speculation, but the trail of facts seems to indicate that Sun has some information or an agreement that could impact the outcome of SCO's legal manoeuvres. At the same time, many questions remain unanswered. For example, if Sun had so much leverage, why did it have to pay $82m to Novell in 1994 for its expansive rights? With an $800m deal hanging in the balance, did Sun strong-arm AT&T -- its Unix partner in kind for over a decade -- before USL was sold to Novell? Perhaps the answers to these questions lie under Scott McNealy's pillow, and perhaps not. We'll have to wait to see how it all plays out.