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"A small brouhaha is occurring in the business blog space," writes Linux.SYS-CON.com columnist Dave Taylor, "with Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz complaining that IBM is acting in a nasty, proprietary fashion by not immediately jumping on the chance to port its WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products to the new Solaris 10 operating system."

In a demonstration of the instantaneity and power of blogging Taylor, who in a his blog on Tuesday accused Schwartz of "not looking at the big picture," was imediately contacted by Schwartz himself: "My point is simple," Schwartz countered, "Solaris 10 is open source (and way improved over S9), and to the extent IBM is an open source supporter, then we...would like them to make their products available. SAP, Oracle, BEA, Veritas - everyone else has, why are they sitting on their hands? To stifle competition." 

"Let me assure you," Schwartz continues, "writing an open letter to IBM requesting they honor customer requests to port to Solaris 10 is not done out of a desperate need for their products - that wouldn't be an effective strategy for getting what we want. It instead points out that IBM, the apparent patron saint of open source...well, isn't."

For Taylor's response to this, read his new LinuxWorld.com "mirror" blog at http://blog.linuxworld.com/read/1029724.htm. 

Except from Taylor:

"The big picture is that IBM has already aggressively embraced the open standards world - indeed they're doing more now to promote it than Sun Microsystems is - and their open source platform of choice is the industry standard Linux OS. Not Solaris 10, a Johnny-come-lately in the open source world."

Excerpt from Schwartz:

"with $130B installed base, and a million new licenses over the past year (well beyond Red Hat), let me assure you, *lots* of folks are interested in Solaris... and moreover, so you should be, too, even if you never use it. Choice matters, in my view. Even if you ignore it."

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