Sun Insists Red Hat Linux Is Proprietary

Sun Microsystems Inc. President Jonathan Schwartz says that he knows proprietary when he sees it and that Red Hat Inc.'s enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is proprietary. Following up on his earlier arguments that RHEL is proprietary, Schwartz said, "Availability of source code isn't what qualifies you as 'not proprietary'—Sun's definition of proprietary is behavior which defeats the customer's ability to compete vendors against one another, or choose from among many 'compatible' implementations. To me, J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] is an open standard—it enables substitution and competition among multiple, competing vendors. Just like Apache."

Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, said Schwartz is confusing the issue. "There is a perfectly good word for what Mr. Schwartz is describing. That word is 'anti-competitive,' and he should use it rather than attempting to confuse 'open source' with 'proprietary,'" he said.

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