Sun vs Red Hat starts to get a bit bizarre

In this post I pointed to a remarkably frank interview where Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive explained their strategy to ZDNet UK.  Prior to this interview Jonathan had gone a bit over the top in one of his blogs articles where he said:

Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We’ll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy.

Not suprisingly if you read the post and the ZDNet article Red Hat must be feeling a bit miffed with Jonathan right now, but Michael Tiemann in his responce goes equally over the top on his blog where he says:

The open source community doesn’t do what you ask them to do unless either (a) they trust you, or (b) what you ask them to do fits into some larger goal they’ve already signed onto. Merely being pathetic doesn’t score a whole lotta points, even if you are an executive of a once-great company

There are some interesting comments to Michael Tiemanns’ article. The first comments that Red Hat executives should not speak for the open Source community:

You sure use the word us and we a lot for being a profit driven corporation. You are a representative of Redhat not that of all of Open Source. The us and we bit is pretty silly. Stop trying to turn issues into a us versus them argument. For many people, linux is about unification and standards, not the same old Unix wars of the 90s. Sun makes strong contributions to the open source world as does Redhat. The open source issue is not as clear cut as you try to present it.

The other comments asks both executives to get things in perspective and stop bickering:

I hate it when executives argue and bicker over the internet. it really does make you look immature. Sun has their views and you have yours. Personally i disagree with you both.

” We are not bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. We are realists, living in a world of reality. Come join us. Calling us lunatics and making other claims that don’t stand up is not the Open Source way. “

Actually you guys are numbskulls and you don’t live in a world of reality, you live in a world of idealogy. Realists would have the insight to see that Open Source software development will never kill Proprietary software development and realists would not spread FUD over Poprietary software development, instead realists would work on interoperability issues. Realists would not have the “Windows must die for Linux to live” mentality. Personally I dont want Linux to become the dominant OS on computers. I like having Windows, Solaris, Mac and linux. Believe it or not I use Windows, Solaris and Linux. They all serve a purpose and they all perform their jobs well. This is software people not the second coming.