Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Sun’s McNealy to HP’s Hurd: Let’s get together on Unix

news
Mar 1, 20062 mins

Convergence is proposed for Solaris, HP-UX

Sun Chairman/CEO Scott McNealy, in an email to Hewlett-Packard CEO/President Mark Hurd on Wednesday, is proposing convergence of HP’s HP-UX Unix OS with Sun’s Solaris 10 Unix OS.

HP, McNealy said, had compelled its customers, developers and partners to change by ending development of PA-RISC servers and relegating HP-UX to systems running Intel’s Itanium processor.

“We propose an alternative – that Sun and HP commit to converge HP-UX with Sun’s flagship volume Unix, Solaris 10,” McNealy said.  During the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco last month, Sun President/COO Jonathan Schwartz said Sun had made such overtures to HP. An HP representative contacted after Schwartz’s comments rejected Sun’s proposal and had only harsh words for Sun, saying its market share was eroding and it was losing customers to HP and IBM.

When notified of McNealy’s overtures on Wednesday, HP responded with no comment.

But McNealy argues that teaming up with Sun would benefit HP customers. “By combining our resources and investments, HP’s customer and developer communities would gain the benefit of the fastest growing operating system in the marketplace: improved economics, rapid innovation and a rich future roadmap otherwise unavailable to your ProLiant user base (given that HP-UX doesn’t run on ProLiant),” McNealy said.

“I would welcome the opportunity to meet and discuss how we can work together to satisfy customer demand. We stand ready to help,” McNealy said in his email.

He also cited Solaris 10 having had more than 4 million licenses issued in the past year, which he said was more than HP had shipped with HP-UX in the history of HP.

McNealy said HP and Sun share a common history of innovation. This is far cry from McNealy calling HP just a printer company, which he has been known to do.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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