Once More unto the Breach

OSBC Keynote Competition between Sun, Microsoft, and IBM — IBM Won

I continue to stand in awe of IBM's ability to market. Here's how the line-up of executive keynotes went down this morning at OSBC.

First up was Jonathon Schwarz, Sun CEO. Jonathon always gives good presentations, although he seemed a little brittle this morning. His messages this morning:

• It's all about the cloud.
• We are it.
• It's still about business.
• [Please] buy our hardware.

Microsoft stepped in with Robert Youngjohns, President of Microsoft North America. An excellent soft speaker that quickly established his historical geek credentials and breadth of technology interests beyond Microsoft tech. He apparently even worked at both Sun and IBM. His messages this morning:

• It's all about interoperability.
• We get it [finally].
• It's still about business.
• [Please] buy our software.

Robert Sutor, IBM VP of Open Source and Linux, then finished with a virtuoso performance. It was about collective action. His messages this morning:

• It's all about open source and open standards.
• Linux is an amazing mature flexible solution for the world's information processing problems. "It's not a hammer, but a collection of fine tools." Our involvement in the Linux community is ten years old.
• It's NOT about business. It's about solving hard problems. [A nice paraphrase of Drucker's the purpose of a company is not to make money.]
• We [collectively] have the tools to solve these problems. We [IBM] can help you.

I think the only time he actually mentioned IBM was when he said in passing that they had broken the petaflop barrier last year. It was masterful. It was designed to remind you that IBM has depth of technology experience, and the tools (people, hardware, software, knowledge) to help you with your information management problems. It was a conversation starter between the company and customers. It wasn't about selling technology but rather tailoring solutions — just tell us what you need.

It doesn't matter what you think about each company. Good executive keynotes are performance art delivering a marketing message. (Bad executive keynotes are product announcements to audiences that paid good money to learn something other than the latest thing they're going to be forced to buy.) While all three presenters today are consummate performers, one message was about solving problems, the other two about selling stuff.

Long after Sun's been cut up for parts the way DEC was, and long after Msft stops trading, IBM will still be humming along as a technology solutions company with a mixed-margin portfolio offering, terrifying as that might seem for some. Well done, Bob.

Sun Quietly Continues to Support Drizzle

It seems Sun Microsystems is continuing to support Drizzle. Drizzle is the MySQL fork that was announced at OSCON this past Summer. That said, Sun has been continuing to move developers to work on it internally (Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor). This is all good news. Based on the strength of the MySQL brand and history, drizzle stands to evolve into the next interesting database and Sun has a front row seat to best capture the upside.

Drizzle can be found on LaunchPad and has an active discussion community.

[Update 11:20, 22 Oct 2008: Brian Aker just posted his assumptions on possible directions for Drizzle.]

A Standards Primer

Photo by Dauvit Alexander

I have recently had several long discussions about the motivations and machinations that surround the development of technology interoperability standards. Over the past few years, I've also captured a lot of ideas and experience on the blog. I pulled it all together into one place in the following paper, "Understanding Technology Standardization Efforts" (PDF 86.2K).

For the record, I was a long term participant in the POSIX and UNIX standardization efforts. I was a working group participant, balloted many pieces of the standards and their amendments, and participated in the management of the standards effort at the IEEE as both an inaugural member of the Project Management Committee and a voting member of the Sponsor Executive Committee. I was an international participant at ISO, as document editor, and participated on behalf of three different national body delegations (Canada, U.S., UK) over a number of years. I began my participation in 1989 as a customer (working for EDS with GM and the U.S. government as their primary POSIX-interested customers), but quickly ended up as a vendor, working for MKS developing a conforming POSIX.2 implementation that formed the basis of implementations from IBM, DEC, HP, UNISYS and Sun. In 1995, I put my money where my mouth was on the importance of applications portability, standards and the coming juggernaut of NT and co-founded Softway Systems, implementing the POSIX and UNIX standards on NT to enable UNIX applications to be directly migrated to the platform. A large amount of free and open source software was incorporated into the product. Softway Systems was acquired by Microsoft in 1999, and I worked there for five years. Over the years I've been in regular contact with people standardizing C#/CLI, the Linux Standards Base, and ODF.

Several friends and colleagues from the standards world have reviewed the paper and provided excellent comments. The paper is much better for it. All mistakes obviously remain my own.

FTC Settlement on Patent Abuse and Standards (and Open Source Implications)

Andy updegrove posted great news this morning on his standards blog. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced its resolution that a patent licensing promise made by a patent holder in a standards setting process is binding on a future holder of the patent.

National Semiconductor participated in an IEEE standards effort to develop the 100 Mbps "Fast Ethernet" specification in 1994. Two key (pending) patents were under their control, and they licensed them clearly, cleanly, and cheaply for US$1000 flat one-time fee to all takers. The patents changed hands, first to a group (2002) that wanted to change the licensing deal, then to N-Data (2003), a patent troll that was aggressively pursuing a changed expensive license.

Andy sums it up best:

"[T]he reliance upon promises made with respect to patents is of concern not only in the standard setting context, but with respect to open source software as well. The details of the settlement will provide significant guidance as to how the regulators would view similar conduct in an open source setting. Moreover, in the case of N-Data, the FTC has acted aggressively while acknowledging that the actions at issue might not rise to the level of violating relevant antitrust laws. In doing so, the Commissioners provide strong assurance to participants in standard setting that the FTC recognizes the importance of standards in the modern world. Finally, the details of the actual settlement demonstrate a willingness on the part of the FTC to craft a detailed and savvy set of requirements that addresses the realities of actual licensor-licensee conduct in the marketplace."

This is great news in the context of patent promises made to open source developers from the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems, and through mechanisms like the Open Invention Network and the Linux Foundation's Patent Commons Project. It removes FUD slung around with respect to patents and intellectual property in both the standards arena and open source project communities. Each is a collaborative effort with significant economic importance and impact. Each will hopefully see the intellectual property landscape a little more clearly now.

Full details on Andy's blog.

GOSCON Discussion on Open Document Formats

Deb Bryant is blogging, which is great news. Deb is of course the creator and executive director of the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) that is held each year in Portland, OR.

The closing session of last Fall's conference was an executive panel on open document formats that included representatives from Sun, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe. Deb's latest post points to the video of the panel, as well as the ongoing GOSCON forum discussion between the panellists. If you're interested in either the open document standards debate or government involvement in free and open source software, I would encourage you to have a read.

MySQL and Sun

Sun Microsystems wants to acquire MySQL AB for US$1Billion. Stephen O'Grady (Redmonk) posted his always excellent deal analysis on his blog. I would urge you to have a read. (It also is a great collection of the relevant URLs.) I'll fit a few extra observations around it. Jonathan's blog post sets the tone for Sun, while Zack's post sets the MySQL perspective straight. But first, congratulations to Monty Widenius and David Axmark for their original vision, and to Mårten Mickos, Zack Urlocker, and Brian Aker and the rest of the team that has built so much value into MySQL AB. Congratulations also to Sun for having the vision to acquire MySQL.

Christensen is the first to point out in his presentations that what he originally called “disruptive technology” in The Innovator’s Dilemma was later observed to be a “disruptive business model” by Andy Grove during a presentation at Intel. (The book had already gone to print, and so we now have loads of technology companies running around thinking their technology is more important than their business models.)

Christensen models demonstrate that a disruptive business model generally begins with an inexpensive “inferior” technology offered at a lower price in a different margin business model that enables customers either to do something they’ve never been able to do or to avoid the expensive control point. The “inferior” technology matures as the business grows and eventually the business grows into mature markets (i.e. the business model is disruptive). Think Linux from undergraduate project in 1991 to the IBM and Red Hat/MSDW Wall Street keynotes at LinuxWorld in 2002. So too with MySQL.

Oracle hammered away at the message that MySQL was missing key features high-end relational databases needed to support mission critical applications. But MySQL is the Web’s database. It was created with a different vision and goal in mind, and enabled an entirely new group of customers to make it the “M” in LAMP. It is gaining the features needed to eventually allow it to be an Oracle replacement, but that isn’t the goal today, nor has it been the business model. This means that any way Oracle executives try to measure the database (transactions, scale out, etc.) or the company (units, revenue, etc.) will leave them scratching their heads. To Oracle’s credit, they quickly understood that it isn’t that MySQL is free or open source software that’s their [future] problem but the business models around it that are disquieting, and so adjust their rhetoric accordingly.

I raised questions about cultural mixing when Red Hat acquired JBoss, but I think it is less critical this time or rather my questions about the processes and values with respect to customers will be less of an issue. MySQL should be a separate enough line of business for the foreseeable future.

I think Stephen’s analysis from the Sun angle is perfect. Sun continues to evolve its solution to customers to enable it to be the heart of the Web. Owning a word in the customer’s mind is the pinnacle of marketing excellence. But complex network computing solutions aren’t quite as simple as “Kleenex”, “Xerox” or “Escalator”.

IBM evolved to be a company that offered their customers all the technology choice AND the expertise to knit it together into a coherent unique customized solution. It doesn’t matter how imperfectly true that statement may or may not be -- but rather what customers perceive it to be. That doesn’t mean IBM isn’t happy to push an IBM-centric technology agenda, but it’s the customer relationship that’s important (since they’re the people with the money and the choice) and IBM focuses on ensuring they have the breadth of product offering to best map their customers’ self-selected heterogeneous needs. They are no longer the “Selectric” company and have even evolved with the networked IT world to be more than the “mainframe” company. IBM continues to build their message around open systems, standards, and open source, which suits their customer’s heterogeneous decisions. IBM is the “data center” company.

Sun is also evolving its message and its offerings to suit their customers heterogeneous web-based applications needs. They’re building relationships with IBM, Microsoft, the Linux community, and now they’re acquiring MySQL. Sun is in a position to deliver a heterogeneous technology base to their customers’ heterogeneous needs and to shape a marketing message that began as technology slogans around “the network is the computer” and “the dot in Dot Com” into a customer centric idea like the “Web” company. That doesn’t mean they won’t meet severe competition from IBM for which idea word is more important in customers’ minds, but they’re still in the game after being counted out too many times in the past.

IBM Joins OpenOffice.org (The Quick Analysis)

It's official — IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org project. [There's good reporting and analysis from Andy Updegrove and Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady.  Update (12 Sep): Here's Andy's interview with IBM's Doug Heintzman, Director of Strategy for the Lotus division.] 

Here's the back of the envelop analysis.

From the OpenOffice.org community perspective, I'm guessing Louis Suarez-Potts (OO.o Community Manager) is feeling good to get a new injection of code/energy.  This is great for the community.  The OpenOffice suite keeps getting better and better, but new blood with new code could provide a much needed boost.

Overall Sun Microsystems is probably [very] happy IBM is supporting OpenOffice.org directly.  This is a much better situation than IBM building some form of ODF development platform inside Eclipse.org to enable ODF over OOXML, with OpenOffice.org hit as collateral damage.  [This would be sort of ironic since Eclipse helped to pull the Java centre-of-gravity away from Sun, and Visual Studio was collateral damage (or icing depending upon one's perspective).]  Collaboration is the much stronger market play here for Sun and IBM, and most importantly OO.o users and customers.

From the IBM perspective, this is brilliant business as usual.  ODF is the global leverage they need to crack open the Microsoft Office marketplace.  (I've written ad nauseam that ODF and Microsoft Office is just another example of Christensen economics in motion.  Microsoft has over-delivered on Office.  They mistakenly think more innovation faster is the answer.  Let the chips fall where they may.)  IBM will likely use OpenOffice to front-end Lotus and the Domino server product lines, and anchor their business messages to their customers's needs around standards and open source software, much the same as they do with Eclipse and the Websphere developer world.  Their claims are that much stronger with this announcement.

Sun gave Gnome a huge leg up about four years ago when they contributed a wealth of their accessibility technology R+D.  IBM will now contribute the same into OpenOffice.org.  It means they can easily manage their way through U.S. government procurement regulation in this space.  Once again brilliant IP management from IBM, and good for OO.o users and customers.  [For those that have heard me present, this is exactly what I mean about having a mature intellectual asset strategy, and being generous exactly in order to play to win.]

A strengthened OpenOffice.org will help Novell immeasurably to keep their distance with Microsoft on the desktop.  Novell has done a lot of work with OO.o in the past.  They have a great desktop Linux product.  They can simply take a ride on this one and eat the benefits.  There's really nothing Microsoft can say here.  Regardless of any agreements around OOXML that Novell may have with Microsoft, Novell comes out clean on the ODF front as customers demand it.

I noticed the press release includes a quote from Beijing's Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., the makers of Redflag Linux and RedOffice.  This is significant.  Apparently last November I was one of the first people to blog about the document format work in China that led to a Chinese national standard (UOF).  Redflag Chinese 2000 was implementing UOF in Red Office (the Chinese packaging of OO.o).  There is work afoot to harmonize ODF and UOF.  And clearly Redflag Chinese 2000 remains committed to the OO.o effort.

So despite the bluff and bluster, the OOXML camp inside Microsoft should not be sleeping well at this point. 

"Don't blink.  Blink and you're dead.  Don't turn your back.  Don't look away.  And don't blink.  Good luck!" — the Doctor

Open Source Business 3 + 3

Mikko Puhakka began a challenge on his blog yesterday to list three success factors and three things to avoid when building businesses using free and open source software.  He then tagged five of us to jump on. (Mårten Mickos has already responded.)  So, here goes based on what I've seen and done: 

Three ways open source software can benefit your business:

• Open source software is a great way to enable innovation on your platform.  We all know there are shrinking orders of magnitude differences between the number of people that use your software, to the number that report bugs, down to the number that deeply contribute BUT those contributions can be golden in keeping the creativity and ideas flowing, as well as just plain brilliant direct additions to your product space.  There is no predictability as to when such contributions arrive, but they won't arrive if you don't make the software available. 
• Your community of users is an incredible asset to spread the word.  It's not just about people using your software for free and telling other people about it, but rather the fact that developers will start taking it to work and it will sneak in under the floorboards.  This is how the PC revolution started.  It's why Visual Basic is still huge.  It's how the Linux revolution happened.  So too with MySQL.  And then the CIO discovers it and they need to treat it as a proper product asset just like any other asset on which the business depends.
• Use open source software to rapidly develop new product complements for your solution.  It helps amortize the cost of development/support/maintenance across the community of developers/users/customers/partners/competitors.  You must, however, be a good community player. 
  

And three "ideas" to avoid when thinking about open source software and your business:

• Just because you published the source code does not make your product any more remarkable to your customers.  At the end of the day, you have a business to run, and that means customers need solutions to their problems.  A mediocre solution won't become "better", or the wrong solution won't suddenly fit the situation, because the source code is now available.
• Understand your value proposition and your core competency, and choose your license wisely: if your entire core competency that enables your core value proposition to your customers is embodied in the software, DON'T publish it in such a way that you give away the company.  I have seen a situation in the security world where the software solution was everything.  If they had made the software available under the wrong license, they would have essentially given away their future growth.
• Just because you published the source code does not mean the world is going to work for you for free.  It's been a while since we saw this level of naivety with the original Mozilla launch from Netscape, but I'm betting there are still a lot of business people that don't understand open source software economics that still have old ignorant opinions. 
  

So whom to tag next?  I'll reach for:

• Michael Tiemann (an early and original player),
• Manel Sarasa, OpenBravo CEO (keeping with growing interesting companies in other parts of the planet meme),   
• Jonathan Schwartz (because a big company opinion is always good to have, and Jonathan is nothing if not original in his thinking and his willingness to push the envelop),
• Stephen O'Grady (to get the analyst opinion in early), and
• David Skok (to get an interesting investor opinion)

Okay.  I can't stop here.  Three more opinions I think would be important to have:

• Javier Soltero, Hyperic CEO (because like Manel he too is in the throws of carefully building a company),
• Taiwen Jiang "D.J." (because China is coming)
• Amy Jiang (because China is coming, and Ubuntu is just plain important)

And Christopher Kuhn at OTRS jumped on board as well. 

China Open Source Software Summit, Beijing

[srw — There are a collection of links to presentations, blogs, and photos at the end of this post.  Please don't hesitate to forward other links as you find them (regardless of language), and I'll add them to the lists.  Thanks.  (Updated lists 7-Apr-2007, 16:36, and again 26-Apr-2007, 13:16)]

www.flickr.com stephenrwalli's Beijing Open Source Forum photoset

It started when a friend organized a meeting in her Beijing offices the last days of January with the conference hosts for the upcoming 2007 Software Innovation Summit.  She had invited the appropriate people from both CoSoft (a government funded organization) and CIO Insight (a Ziff-Davis publication).  After a long discussion in Chinese, she turned to me, "So here's the deal ...."  If I could find a small amount of external sponsorship, they would allow me to organize the speaking agenda for the Open Source Software Forum part of the Summit — a one day affair. 

Part of the reason I was even in Beijing was to determine what it would take to hold a proper open source software conference in China by the end of the year.  In two trips to Beijing in three months I had seen a lot of interest, excitement and energy around open source software. This seemed a good opportunity to start to understand what it would actually take to organize such an event.  I mean really — how hard could it be?  Even if it was just eight weeks until 27 March. 

There was all manner of fun along the way:

• Chinese New Year "appeared" in the middle of the planning cycle, cutting 10 days out of the time line.  Everyone goes home for at least a week for the Spring Festival.  Welcome to the Year of the Pig! 
• Most companies can't sponsor anything with eight [short] weeks of notice.
• That said, I found two sponsors reasonably quickly, but needed one more to be able to actually afford the expenses for me to attend the event I was organizing.  And I found the third!  And I booked my tickets.  And then that sponsor had to bail!  There was a tense 24 hours while I found my second third sponsor.  And this was all under two weeks before I needed to get on a plane.
• We were also going to have another Open Tuesday event the evening of 27 March.  My co-conspirator (Mikko) was traveling to S. Africa and Spain on other Open Tuesday business for the last two weeks before Beijing, and proceeded to (a.) get really sick on the road, (b.) have his mobile phone stolen, (c.) discover how bad Internet connectivity can be from even good hotels in Johannesburg.   That was one very long 12 days for both of us. 
• In the last week, the day before one speaker was due to get on a plane, we discovered their business invitation letter to obtain their visa was not appropriate.  That was another tense 24 hour scramble.  (And this was one of the speakers I really really wanted to be there.) 
• This was my third trip to Beijing in four months, and the first five star hotel where all the front desk staff were uncomfortable in English.  So it was a fun challenge trying to get reservations sorted out, among other small problems.
• Monday morning, I head downstairs.  I've basically planned on an entire day to sort out whatever needs to be done getting ready for the next day.  My front desk inquiry about "tomorrow's conference" leads me to the catering office, where I was greeted with, "What conference?"   And that was just the start of Monday.  Much of Monday was spent tensely watching the organization unfold without the benefit of a common language to ask questions, and no prior conference organization experience to know what should happen next.  (Prior experience on program committees does not a conference organizer make.) I really need to get a more relaxing hobby. 

Despite a hectic eight weeks, the day came off without a hitch.  It was brilliant!  There were seats for about 100 people, but they brought in probably another 12-20 seats for the overflow.  I had friends in the audience that said the translations were excellent, and the conference attendees all really enjoyed the talks.  (It was much better than they anticipated.)  The conference hosts (CoSoft and CIO Insight) were really pleased.  My speakers all felt they learned a lot from this experience, including a couple of speakers that had already made trips to their own vendor events in Beijing. 

I owe a lot to my friends here. 

• My sponsors for trusting I could pull it off: Google (Chris Dibona), O'Reilly Radar (Nat Torkington), and the Linux Foundation (Jim Zemlin). 
• My speakers for taking time out of their busy schedules to travel to Beijing and see first hand what I'm seeing around open source software in China:  Nat Torkington (O'Reilly Radar),  Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Mike Olson (Oracle), Jim Grisanzio (Sun), Taiwen Jiang (XOOPS China),  Mikko Puhakka (Open Tuesday), Calvin Sun (MySQL).  Most of them had to travel a long way to get there. 
• My friends for their encouragement and support: Anne Stevenson-Yang for getting me involved and cheering me on, Ada Wang (Anne's analyst and my negotiator), Jethro Cramp (running additional air cover for me in Beijing and keeping me sane late at night over his early morning tea).
• Jing Jing Helles for all her translation work on speaker presentations.  While we had full simultaneous translation in session, the presentations were something we still had to do ourselves.  I wanted the Chinese attendees to have the information in Chinese to carry away. 
• James Ding was the primary point of contact at CIO Insight.  He made the logistics happen.  It was a great day. 

Here are all the presentations and current translations.  I'm working at getting the audio up as well. 

• Stephen Walli (Consultant)
  Open Source Software Economics, IP, and Standards in 30 Minutes (PDF, 404KB)
  开放源代码软件经济, 标准 与知识产权 30分钟 (PDF, 468KB)
• Nat Torkington (O'Reilly Radar, OSCON Program Chair)
  Open Source Radar (PDF, 1MB)
• Christophe Bisciglia (Google, Sr. Software Engineer, Open Source Programs Office)
  Google and Open Source, Beyond Software (PDF, 68KB)
  * Christophe actually delivered more slides, but the images are NOT presently for sharing.
• Mike Olson (Oracle/Sleepycat, Vice-president, Embedded Technologies)
  Building an Open Source Business (PDF, 284KB)
  建立开源商业 (PDF, 340KB)
• Calvin Sun (MySQL, Development Manager of Storage Engines)
  Product Development The MySQL Way (PDF, 1.2MB)
• Taiwen Jiang (XOOPS Community Leader, China)
  A XOOPS Story: On Development of Free Software and Open Source Community in China (PDF, 344KB)
  从XOOPS的发展看中国自由软件的开发与 开源社区的建设 (PDF, 332KB)
• Jim Grisanzio (Sun Microsystems, Community Manager, OpenSolaris Engineering
  The OpenSolaris Story (PDF, 2.1MB)
  OpenSolaris 介绍 (PDF, 3.4MB)
• Mikko Puhakka (Founder of Open Tuesday, MySQL Investor)
  Open Tuesday (PDF, 136KB)
  北京讲演 (PDF, 204KB)

Blog and news coverage:

• Jim Grisanzio's blog and Flickr stream
• Nat Torkington's blog commentary.
• Michael Iannini's blog coverage for ZDNet Asia.  I understand what Michael saw as a Beijing insider, but the reverse is also true.  We each made great inroads to furthering the discussions we each wanted to have.
• Jing Jing Helles Flickr stream.
• Amy Jiang's blog coverage with an interesting cultural observation.

Some official Chinese news coverage (in Chinese) based on the CoSoft news item (thanks to D.J.):

• http://it.sohu.com/20070328/n249037336.shtml
• http://soft.yesky.com/info/246/3144746.shtml
• http://linux.ccidnet.com/art/308/20070329/1047983_1.html
• http://www.pcmag.com.cn/news/industry/story/200704/51002636.shtml
• http://news.csdn.net/n/20070328/102381.html

We get to "meet the press" at day's end. L-to-R: Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Jim Grisanzio, Nat Torkington, Mikko Puhakka.  Taiwen Jiang and I are off camera.   

Ian Murdock Joins Sun

Ian Murdock announced yesterday that he has joined Sun Microsystems as Chief Operating Platforms Officer.  Ian describes his move on his blog.  Stephen O'Grady at Redmonk has a good commentary and summary of other blog commentary. 

This is a great move for Sun, the Linux Foundation, and Ian. 

For Sun:
Sun (as most UNIX OEMs through the 1990s) invested heavily in ISV relationships.  Sun was hit hard by the Bubble bursting.  Linux was cheap "UNIX" in the eyes of many customers, bought out of their PC hardware catalog as it were.    Gravity shifted for the ISVs away from Sun and over to the dominant Linux vendors through the excellent efforts of the Free Standards Group and others.  As Sun begins to reassert itself as a cool computing platform again, they need to re-engage with ISVs (both new and old alike).  Having Ian on board with his background in Linux binary compatibility opens up new opportunities for new discussions with those ISVs.  This doesn't mean that this is the strategy, just that it opens possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist without the relationships and history that comes with Ian.

The Linux Foundation:
First, while they're losing a CTO, they're gaining a strong champion in a vendor that is on the rise again and has long supported UNIX standardization, and will remain LSB chair.   

Second, everyone always wants to understand why Red Hat plays so coy with the LSB.  As the dominant Linux vendor, the last positioning they want is "we're just like everyone else."  Solaris on Intel opens interesting new opportunities for Sun customers looking to transition to new less expensive hardware.  They didn't want rewrite costs to Windows (their backlog is growing not shrinking so re-writes are uninteresting) and were considering Linux.  Red Hat has interesting competition again.  If Sun starts to play well with the LSB, Red Hat will participate more.  They can ignore Novell et al.  It would be dangerous for them to ignore Sun the same way. 

For Ian:
Read his blog entry.  He's clearly excited.  Sun lost its cool for a while.  It's great to see it getting its game back.  While both Microsoft and Red Hat may scoff for various reasons, and wave market share numbers around as "proof" of its insignificance, what neither of them realize (or possibly want to admit) is it's about profitability and installed base, and not market share.  Sun is becoming cool again and Ian's in an awesome position to help it.

Congratulations!