Why Sun wants HP source

IT WAS Bill Bluestein, the late, great Forrester Research analyst, who said: "Nobody wants to get into bed with Sun because in the morning they'd be dead."

He was referring to the late, not so lamented ACE consortium - a sort of 'Get Sun' posse of a decade and a half ago - but a reputation for abrasive behaviour and macho posturing has preceded Sun ever since.

The figurehead for the company is, of course, fast-talking CEO Scott McNealy, an embodiment of Silicon Valley brashness.

But now McNealy is coming over nice, suggesting in an open letter to HP's new boss Mark Hurd that the firms merge Unixes to create a single operating system from Solaris and HP-UX. So, what's going on?

First up, he's not being that nice, although he starts out all smiles:

"HP and Sun share a common history of innovation. We've both delivered terrific products over the years."

Then, as is often the case with open letters, the stiletto comes out.

"But HP has also made strategic decisions that compel its customers, developers and partners to change: ending development of your enterprise servers based on PA-RISC, and relegating your operating system, HP-UX, to Itanium."

"Relegating"? Get him, especially when Sun was talking about a Solaris port for Itanium as recently as July 2004.

Then comes the meaty stuff: economies of scale, club together on developers, escape route for HP-UX vets etc etc.

The odd thing is that McNealy's use of the open letter as PR puff suggests he doesn't believe HP will bite. Maybe he has already been rebuffed, but a combination of Solaris and HP-UX would make sense. And not just for headline writers - Sox? Sux? Holaris, anybody?

Albeit under previous management, HP showed that it understands the diminishing returns on Unix investment when it reduced Compaq's Tru64 to organ-donor status. Other Unixes such as Sequent Dynix/ptx have also bought the farm in recent years, or have been reduced to irrelevance.

And McNealy does seem to want to reach out. In articles published by the Financial Times, he hymns business partnerships as the way forward. Sun is tighter than ever with Fujitsu on the next UltraSparc server generation, APL. McNealy has even tried the HP cuddle once before saying in May 2005, "I'm going to talk to Mark Hurd about partnering. It's IBM Global Services v humankind." Most shockingly of all, Sun has also declared peace on Bill Gates.

McNealy's open letter might just be the latest installment of Silicon Valley goofiness but with Sun's stock unders scrutiny going nowhere fast, it makes sense to have buddies. µ

Scott's letter to Mark