I'm posting this mostly as a commentary for Bucy on Sun...

] Tell me what you'd like Slashdot readers to know.
]
] "Tell them that we're returning to our roots," Schwartz
] said, referring to the company's renewed focus on the
] Solaris operating environment.
]
] "And we want developers back on our side. If there's more
] for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added.

This article makes every effort to debunk Sun, and falls on its face. The author makes numerous bad arguements.

He claims you can deploy production services on Gentoo, which is Geek for "I've never actually run a production service, and I have no fucking idea I'm talking about."

He claims that there is no value in getting patches for free from a vendor if all you're getting is "security patches." Once again, this guy has clearly never run production infrastructure. You don't want ANYTHING other then security patches and critical bug fixes. The point is that you build something that works and is reliable and you want to basically leave it alone unless you have to muck with it.

He is totally confused about indemnity and the Kodak suit. The point is that Debian doesn't indemnify it's users and can't.

What this article did do was confirm a suspicion I had when I read about Solaris 10. When Redhat pulled the Iron Curtain down on it's patch program they created a market vacuum. You could install Redhat, and run it, in production, and play around with it just as you would with any linux system, and then if you got to a point where you needed to scale it and support it there is no need to reinstall, reformat, or re-architech. You just call them. That was awesome.

Today there really isn't a solution that offers that. The fact that support is available for a particular distro doesn't mean that support is really what you're looking for. What you want is a strong relationship with a hardware company and good source\bug managment from your software. THATS what SUN is offering. I can build stuff on Solaris, for free, with whatever hardware I've got lying around, and if I need support for it, and big ass hardware, I can get it.

Is this far and away better then the IBM/SUSE/REDHAT combination? No. In fact, its much easier to move my existing linux stuff into the IBM environment with less culture shock. However, it IS competitive. They are offering three things that IBM isn't:

1. The scaling without speed bumps that I talk about here.
2. One stop shopping.
3. In some cases better technology.

This author seems to be really excited about SUSE. I've never found SUSE to be particularly exciting. Seemed like it was a linux distro that was focused on handling European customers right. Novell now owns it. Novell is a company that had a great product that got obsolete while they weren't looking. They were left with a lot of money and a lot of people and nothing to do. They've been floundering around ever since looking for meaning in life.

Why SUSE vs. Redhat? I mean it. Anyone actually running SUSE? Novell does a good job of explaining what they offer:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/why_novell.html

It seems like they have a cultural hill to climb. Most geeks are still pretty happy with what Redhat was doing in last few years.