“Asked whether he was referring to IBM and HP with that
comment, Mehra replied “yes — we will ship our own Linux
Distribution optimized for our general purpose servers and server
appliances, rather than simply making some Linux vendor’s standard
distribution available to the customers of our systems.”Like IBM and HP, Sun intends to make significant contributions
of key technologies to Linux. “Linux enhancements will be provided
back to the community,” said Mehra, adding that “this is a
statement of direction, and won’t happen over night.”Does today’s big Linux announcement signal the start of a shift
towards Linux and away from Solaris (Sun’s version of UNIX)? “Not
at all,” Mehra replied. “Both SPARC (Sun’s processor) and Solaris
are continually growing and maturing and getting better. We think
we can improve both Linux and Solaris at the same time.”