Catfight at the LKML corral

ok, not really. Linus stated some things in a post to the linux kernel mailing list. IMO he is spot on. Jonathan’s reply is what I expect from a CEO.

Our experience in trying to work with Sun has been one of them pushing Solaris as the solution for everything, even when customers (and resellers in our case) spec’ed designs using Linux as the customers preferred. Solaris is not being targeted by many new ISVs or IHVs, Linux is. There is a reason for that. A good reason. ZFS may or may not be interesting, it is hyped beyond belief. We use xfs and jfs for the moment for JackRabbit which does a pretty good job of dominating benchmarks relative to its Sun thumper competition. I liked the people I met working or trying to work with Sun. Its just that the force-fitting of Solaris where it doesn’t belong wastes everyone’s time. It is hard (really, really hard) to install. Code built for it does not appear to run as fast as gcc built code running on Redhat on the same physical hardware. Oh well, I expect the war of words and escalation to continue. It doesn’t seem to matter that for all intents and purposes, the battle is over.