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What's a Linux guy doing at Sun?
May 09, 2007

That's the question that Ian Murdock, the co-founder of Debian Linux and long time Linux leader, posed, and answered, at Sun's annual JavaOne tradeshow in San Francisco this week.

While I wasn't there, ace eWEEK reporter Daryl Taft did make it. He reports that Murdock said, "When people say they want Linux, they don't actually mean they want Linux. What they want is the Linux userland user environment and the Linux business model. They want choice. They want the Linux distribution and I'm the Linux distribution guy."

Murdock went on to say that "Solaris is similar [to Linux] except for a different kernel," and that Sun's goal is to make Solaris a better Linux than Linux. At the same time, though, Sun can't just make "a forklift upgrade because there are some things about Unix we want to keep -- like backward compatibility, which is one thing Linux does awfully."

When Murdock left his last job in Linux land, CTO of the newly formed Linux Foundation, said that one reason he was going was because "Sun is a company I've always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up."

Since he's joined Sun, Murdock closed down his former Linux business, Progeny, on April 30. Progeny was an outsource provider of Linux distribution maintenance. Its concept was to enable companies to have their own custom tailored Linux distributions, without needing to make it themselves. RPath takes a somewhat similar course but focuses on creating Linux-based application servers.

There's no word yet on whether Murdock might consider a similar plan for OpenSolaris, but he did promise in San Francisco "There's a big anniversary coming up and you can expect something to happen at that time." June 14 will be the OpenSolaris project's second birthday.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols



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