Sun's COO Pretends Linux Belongs To Red Hat

An anonymous reader writes "Ever mindful of minting phrases likely to spread virally through the Net, reports JDJ, Jonathan Schwartz's blogging gifts were used Friday to assert that "it's increasingly evident the OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux." The article comes up with a new angle on one of the most-talked about members of the tech-exec digerati, saying of Schwartz: "He's the Winston Churchill of technology - he mobilizes the English language at least once a week, and sends it into battle against Sun's rivals." But Churchill would never have tried to pull a fast one by disingenuously describing Linux as "Red Hat's Linux" - the community will upbraid him, for certain. Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen."

Re:he's right though

[SpooForBrains]

In America, yes. Not in many parts of Europe, and increasingly not in the UK.

Re:Mac OS X?

[daveschroeder]

Wow. Why do people think the only place Macs are used are in "design"?

My world is also a University. One of the largest public research Universities in the country, the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I don't know where you are, but there are ridiculously far more Mac OS X users here than Linux users. Linux is probably used for server applications more than Mac OS X Server, but on the desktop, it's so laughably not even close. Walk up and down the halls of our life and biomedical sciences buildings, physics and astronomy, engineering, medical, and other research areas, and you'll see Mac OS X, Mac OS X, Mac OS X. You'll see the same thing at DoE National Laboratories. (Incidentally, our CS department just bought 33 5.6TB Xserve RAIDS for a grid computing project, for a total of 185TB. No Mac OS X in that order, but still...)

Wow. I'm still kind of floored at what you said, considering Mac OS X is *everywhere* at every large academic research institution I've been to lately (Caltech, Stanford, Umich, MIT...)

Re:What's the problem?

[davecb]

He's speaking to businessmen who buy particular vendor's products. They didn't buy DOS, they bought MS-DOS, and ignored DR-DOS.

Similarly they buy Red Hat in the U.S., so he's obviously adressing U.S. businessmen. If he were adressing German businessmen he'd have said "SuSE's Linux".

In neither case would I expect him to say "version of". The listener is expected to get that from context.

--dave

Re:he's right though

[weileong]

I don't think too many people here have actually in fact read John Schwartz's blog.

Extracted from his blog (his words):

Red Hat does not equal linux, and linux is not evil. But, linux in the enterprise datacenter (that is, not your basement or startup or dorm room or gamebox) does equal Red Hat - and competing against a company is what we do for a living

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040721 #competing_against_a_social_movement [sun.com]