LinuxWorld 2005

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Sunday, December 15th, 2002

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LinuxWorld 2005 – Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, announced today that Solaris 9 would continue to be supported on SPARC despite Sun’s recent announcement that Sun Linux 4.0 would be the core operating system on all of its hardware lines.

In related news, Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina assured legacy system owners that HP would continue to support HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Tru64 Unix even though Linux would now be HP’s flagship operating system across the Alpha, Pentium V, and Itanium III lines.

However, the real story of LinuxWorld 2005 continues to be the war of words between the recently formed Red Hat/ Oracle/Dell (ROD) and HP/UnitedLinux/IBM (HUI) consortiums, as both sides continue to accuse the other of forking the Linux kernel. But, as Linus Torvalds pointed out in his keynote address, the kernel itself remains the one, true kernel, and the extensions that ROD and HUI have added are purely optional.

Ransom Love, president of IBM and former leader of Caldera (which changed its name to The SCO Group in 2002) and UnitedLinux, bragged that UnitedLinux will never fork the kernel. He added, of course, “We will add extensions to Linux to get the most from DB3 and WebSphere.” But, he continued, Red Hat and Oracle began doing that with Red Hat Advanced Server (RHAS) back in 2002.

While those close to Linux fret over the ROD/HUI battle, the business market doesn’t care. As Dan Kusnetzky,…

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