Arrogance or fear?

It is just me, or is this statement full of arrogance:

"They've fragmented the non-Windows operating system world and they continue to do so," he said. But he acknowledged he did not see much chance of Sun moving away from Solaris.

Mr. Morton, Solaris and SunOS were around long before Mr. Torvalds buyed it´s first 386. So, when you really want to talk about fragmentation, please look in the nearest mirror. But this discussion is nonsensical: There is no fragmentation in a world, where the next binary is just one makefile away. It doesn´t fragment the non-windows world, it eats away the Linux adressable market. And this is a huge difference.

So, why do they isssue such bold statements. In my opinion, Opensolaris is the most dangerous competitor for Linux in the open source based economy. At least from my point of view, i see many die-hard-linux shop that consider Solaris or Opensolaris. The luminaries of Linux are quite aware of this fact. Futhermore, there are some technical like ZFS or dtrace developments, where Linux can´t participate, because of the license they use (it´s a GPL problem, not a problem of the CDDL, as the BSDs or MacOS X can use Opensolaris technology).

When you look at Opensolaris and Linux, they seem to be mirror universes. Similar, but with important differences: Both are open-source, but as Linux thrives to broaden it´s common of code, Solaris licence was designed to include legacy components and to enable IP-based business with open source. Where Linux has no roadmap, Solaris and Opensolaris have one (can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous) . Linux development and integration in the mainline kernel is driven by the kernel maintainers, whereas Solaris has an full-fledged process to ensure such things like compatibility. Solaris is different enough to attract developers and nobody can really predict the outcome on a five year basis. Both opinopns are perfectly valid. And the communities will decide. By the way: Solaris has a big advantage, Sun is commited to it´s operating system. Linux has such "commited" backers like IBM, which pray Linux and sell AIX ... sorry, could not resist ...

And as a sidenote to the ever-reoccuring "Linux has more drivers" disccusion: In a market, where the newest graphic boards outdates faster than you can pass it over the counter, the advantage of having more hardware drivers can be a very temporary one.