Hi Hilmar,

Thinks are changing so fast it is hard to keep up. Red hat decided to go enterprise, but was a product being pushed by both IBM and Sun. IBM has a huge investment in Linux and got together with Novell to provide a $50 million dollar loan or maybe preferred stock, in Novell, Novell in turned purchased SuSE so IBM's investment in Linux is protected.

IBM could really be hurt if it lost both RedHat and Linux to other companies who interest might be opposed to IBM's Interest.

Sun finally embraced Linux and has ported its Solaris apps so they are cross platform and will run under either Linux or Solaris. Also, Sun will use AMD CPU to compete with Intel processor.

I kind of like war where countries form alliances to protect there common interests.

Sun should be able to support a full spectrum of equipment and OS/s needed, as its Solaris will run under X86 optimized for ADM CPUs or Solaris will also run on Sun's workstations and its mainframes. I would have to rate Sun Solaris as the top OS in the world. It is used to run most of the heavy duty equipment in our Government. Sun's equipment also supports Linux, so there is a lot of opportunities to mix and match to get just the network you want at the lowest price. I think either Linux or Solaris would do a good job of supporting any other non-mainstream OS like Mac, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sun didn't also provide China with some top of the line hardware with its Solaris OS in it deal to support China with its new OS/desktop.

Regards,

LelandJ