Re: Where we stand in regard to the future platform / desktop technology

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

I generally agree with a lot of Havoc's reasoning, but I do feel that a
couple points wrt Sun are worth contending with.

On Sun, 2004-03-28 at 15:42 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>  6. Sun does have dependencies on and reasons to negotiate with the 
>     Linux and open source communities, while Microsoft does not.

I think it is extremely naive to think that Sun actually feels that they
have dependencies on the Linux and open source communities. While their
GNOME group has consistently been a great contributor to GNOME, that is
a small group within a large company which has consistently expressed
extreme hostility towards Linux and misunderstanding at best and
dismissiveness at worst towards the rest of free software. If we give
Sun an opportunity to wipe out the Solaris competition by making
ourselves overly dependent on Java, it's naive to think that this won't
be something that Sun at least strongly considers- there will be
factions within Sun that strongly push for this.

>  7. Sun has a lot less money to spend than Microsoft.

$5B or $50B makes very little difference to us. Either company has the
money in the bank to wipe us out legally if they wanted to.

Luis