“Of course, Sun’s servers don’t run Linux and IBM’s do. IBM
supports Linux because of its adherence to open standards and its
portability across their widely divergent hardware platforms. Sun,
which enjoys a tighter level of binary compatibility across
different platform levels, sees Linux as an operating system that
is not yet as robust as Solaris. Kruell refers to the S/390 port of
Linux as being in an “early experimental stage.” IBM, he says,
wants to use Linux as “a means of stringing customers along with
the hope of a new operating system that will revive a dying
platform, thus preventing customers from migrating their
strategically important applications off of the proprietary
mainframe and onto more open UNIX systems.”
“At this point,” he adds, “enterprise-class Linux is not ready
for the data center, and it will be several years, at best, until
this changes.”