But I have to admit some admiration for Sun's recent moves to reinvent itself in the data center. I was in San Francisco this week for Oracle Open World and had a chance to hear Sun's Scott McNealy outline the company's comeback strategy. I was impressed.

While Sun has taken steps to make its UltraSparc technology more competitive, I was more intrigued by its intentions to put Solaris into the open source domain. This was a huge cultural hairball for Sun to swallow. Sun has maintained for years that Solaris was so superior to Linux that it justified the huge premium it commanded in the market. But users have increasingly had trouble buying that story. For the mass market, Linux worked just fine.

Sun has finally accepted the reality that Solaris was not going to win the battle against Linux in any but the uppermost reaches of the Unix market. This insures that Linux will have a potent high-end competitor for a long time to come. For Sun, the challenge is to insure that there's a reason to buy Sun boxes to run Solaris instead of commodity hardware. That's an easy argument to make right now, while Solaris is still mainly Sun code. It could be a tougher case a couple of years from now.

But that's a battle for the future. Sun's currnet bet is that an open-sourced Solaris will gain enough adherents that the revenue Sun can make from selling hardware to those people will exceed the revenue it would have made selling to a smaller and smaller captive Solaris base. I think it's a good bet.

Linux needs a spoiler and open source Solaris can fill that role. No one seriously argues that Solaris isn't a superior Unix. Sun has specialized in high availability, industrial-grade applications for years. The question was whether Solaris deserved the price premium it commanded. Increasingly, it didn't. By open-sourcing Solaris, Sun is putting a potent Linux competitor into the market. That's good for Linux and for users. It's probably bad for Red Hat, Novell and anyone who has cast its lot with Linux.

I don't see Solaris becoming a mainstream Linux alternative any time soon but for enteprises and those who demand enterprise-class reliability, open source Solaris will be an exciting alternative. If Sun follows through on its commitment to keep Solaris open source, then it will have introduced an exciting new alternative to the market.

The question now is what Red Hat and Novell should do. Both have cast their lots with Linux. But now they have a robust, industrial-grade alternative Unix that could create a profitable revenue stream. Do they stay loyal to Linux or become Solaris adherents, too? It's an interesting problem...