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 COLUMN
Under a Big Blue Sun IF YOU PERUSE Sun's marketing materials from time to time, you may have heard the news. Sun says Linux should not be used on mainframes. It seems that Linux on a mainframe is not cost-effective -- at least if you are Sun and you don't make mainframes.
I've been in the IT industry for two decades. I know the game. Vendor A says it has invented the greatest thing since American cheese food product slices in cellophane sleeves. Vendor B says vendor A has been sniffing the ink from its press releases too long, because everyone knows that Vendor B rules the IT world. And so it goes. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I was drawn to the open-source world in the first place. One of the key concepts of the open-source community is that you can compete on one level while cooperating on another. Coopetition is the term that Caldera CEO Ransom Love likes to use. And that's a good term for it. When you have to rely on the community to create large parts of your software (I doubt that any company could lay claim to having written even 5 percent of any standard Linux distribution), you cannot badmouth your competition too badly. After all, you are both working with the same code base. The business differentiation is what you do with the code in terms of packaging, add-ons, and services. Boasting about your successes rather than the other guy's faults ... what a concept. It's all so refreshing compared to the IT landscape of the past couple of decades. If you dare believe every press release that comes out of this industry during a 30-day period, you'll find out how good your mental health insurance coverage is. You can have a breakdown trying to believe all the conflicting claims. Pick any sizeable niche in this industry and you will find at least a half-dozen companies that claim to be "the leader" in that segment. Every race has only one winner. You cannot have multiple participants all claiming the gold. This isn't the 2002 Winter Olympics, after all. So, when Sun takes on IBM over the issue of who has the best large-scale Linux solution, it is just one more instance of old-world IT. The solution to this conflict is the same as it always has been: Make the participants put their money where their mouths are. Both IBM and Sun are capable of detailing their respective solutions. Price out the implementations and the technical employees needed to fit the bill. Hold the vendors feet to the fire. After all, this is a mainframe-class sale we're talking about, not just a few commodity servers. Demand guarantees to go with the price-performance claims of each competitor. Then let the best solution win. In the end, the best solution is the one that delivers results, not just marketing hype. And that's a sentiment to which open-source adherents can readily ascribe. Send e-mail to Russ at pavlicek@linuxprofessionalsolutions.com. You can also join the discussion online in the the InfoWorld Open Source forum at www.infoworld.com/os .  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsServersDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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