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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Perception, not reality
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Jonathan Schwartz points out that RedHat is trying to "lock in" their customers - ISVs in particular. This isn't a terribly big surprise; The Unix vendors have been doing this long before MS got into the game. He then tries to make a point that runs into one of the classic marketing brick walls - Perception Vs. Reality. Sun would like to push Solaris as more open (in the open standards sense) than Linux:
Folks in the IT community need to be more aware, in my view, of the lock-in to which they're exposing themselves if they don't take a more active role in understanding the difference between and open source and open standards. All the more reason more and more are seeing Solaris as a migration platform as they move off Fedora.
Good luck with that effort. Linux' "street cred" as open is too widespread at this point for Solaris to make any significant dent in it. Sun trying to make the "more open" point is a truly uphill battle against entrenched perceptions. There's also a cost issue to deal with - Sparc boxes (yes, there's Solaris on x86; no one cares) are far, far more expensive than commodity x86 boxes. Here's a tip - Sun isn't competing with RedHat. Sun is competing with Dell - badly...
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