INTERVIEW - McNealy: Livin' la vida Linux

Sun Microsystems Inc. has a knack for being the life of the party.

It charged into the LinuxWorld conference here this week, arriving at the show several years late and with a lukewarm invitation. Still, Scott McNealy, chairman, chief executive officer and president at Sun, managed to charm the open source crowd with a witty keynote speech full of jokes long told in the Unix world but new to the Linux zealots.

McNealy's comic flair helped draw attention away from the fact that Sun just released its first general-purpose Linux server this week -- a two-processor system running on Intel Corp. chips and the new Sun Linux operating system. IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. all pointed to their laundry list of Linux products and called Sun a laggard. McNealy made jokes and stole the show.

Sun may have had the biggest news for this year's LinuxWorld conference, but questions abound as to whether its support will be fleeting or it has started a lasting relationship with the open source OS. In a recent interview with the IDG News Service, McNealy addressed some of these issues, saying Linux fills a very real gap in Sun's arsenal and adds choice to its line of servers that use Solaris on UltraSPARC processors.

McNealy said he is ready to live the "Linux lifestyle," even if it means following a feisty crowd.

IDGNS: What strikes you about the Linux community?

Scott McNealy: It's a tough community, because if you have any copyright, ownership, revenue or profits, you are not a good person. At least with some of the crew, right? I think other people understand there are many different models, and the models can coexist. I'm a person who can play all lifestyles, and I am not ashamed to be open source and a capitalist. I get invited to all the conferences.

IDGNS: Could you lay out how you go to your customers with these different operating system offerings you have now, with Solaris on UltraSPARC chips, Solaris on Intel chips, and Sun Linux?

SM: We are giving them a choice. We are giving them 64-bit hardware or 32-bit hardware. We are giving them horizontal as well as vertical scaling capabilities. Then we are giving them Solaris 9 or Linux. "Two for the price of none" is what I am calling it on the x86 (Intel instruction set) box. You can run your Linux apps on Solaris with Linux extensions or you can run your Linux apps on Linux and live the lifestyle on x86. And we don't charge you for either. It's basically just bundled.

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