Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, has caused quite a stir recently with remarks that seem to be a rather pointed attack against Sun’s Solaris operating system. To be more precise, Zemlin claims, “The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris.”
Zemlin extended these remarks to compare Solaris’ lack of new deployments to the amazing growth that has taken place in the Linux market. He also referred to Solaris as a “legacy operating environment” with users who are moving to Linux as the life-cycle of their system completes. Adding even more fuel to the fire, Zemlin brought up Sun’s alleged financial problems.
Things started to get really nasty as Zemlin turned his attention towards critiquing Solaris’ award-winning DTrace and ZFS features, insinuating that all the buzz about these tools came from the Sun Sales Department.
What does Sun think about all this? They can’t be too happy. Despite the obvious fact that no one receives news of their supposed impending doom lightly, Sun is actually a card-carrying member of the Linux Foundation. It has to be at least a little annoying to hear these things from the executive director of a foundation that you’ve been supporting both through membership fees and with contributions to open source projects.
Although Zemlin is well-known for his blunt comments, this one is going to be hard for the community to overlook. According to the Linux Foundation’s web site, one of the main activities of the nonprofit organization is stated as:
The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson to advance the interests of Linux and respond with authority to competitors’ attacks. It also fosters innovation by hosting collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry and end users to solve pressing issues facing the Linux ecosystem in such areas as desktop interfaces, accessibility, printing, application packaging, and many others.
Like it or not, an attack on Solaris is also an attack on Sun, and with contributions like OpenOffice.org, Sun is a serious player in the Linux ballpark. Are Jim Zemlin’s remarks really “advancing the interests of Linux” or are they alienating a valuable contributor to the Linux Foundation mission?
By the way, for an operating system on its last legs, Solaris seems to be doing okay in the review department. Among its many positive showings, Sun Solaris 10 picked up an InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Award for Most Innovative Server OS.