Sun and Ubuntu - A Provocative Idea

[Mark Stone]

With the departure of Scott McNealy as CEO of Sun Microsystems, and
the elevation of Jonathan Schwartz to that position, I've been
thinking quite a bit about what Sun could possibly do to salvage
themselves as a company.

The gradual open sourcing of Solaris was a good idea, but perhaps too
little too late. Any possible open sourcing of Java would definitely
be too late to help them. It's difficult for them to embrace a
server-oriented Linux distro like Red Hat.

Which led me to think: Sun has always made a lot of noise about
wanting there to be a desktop alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.
And they really don't have any business strategy that's dependent on
deploying Solaris on the desktop. And they do have a strong track
record of supporting OpenOffice.org, arguably one of the key apps for
making Ubuntu viable to the every day knowledge worker.

So what if Sun did try to strike some kind of partnership with the
Ubuntu community, and embrace Ubuntu as Sun's preferred desktop
solution? I've tried to articulate this possibility as best I can at:
http://osview.blogspot.com/2006/05/open-letter-to-jonathan-schwartz-ive.html

I'm curious what others in the Ubuntu community think about this possibility.


-Mark