'Shame on you, Scott': Users have McNealy in their cross-hairs

In an open letter to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a group of users has called for the company to make Solaris 9 available on the lion's share of computers based on the Intel architecture.

The letter, published as an ad in the San Jose Mercury News and titled 'Shame on you, Scott', is the latest move in an eight-month war of words between Sun and a vocal contingent of its users. The spat kicked off in January when the software maker said it would put its next operating system, Solaris 9, on indefinite hold for the x86 architecture.

Sun released Solaris 9 for its own Sparc server architecture in May.

In mid-August, Sun CEO McNealy announced at LinuxWorld that a new server, the LX50, would run both the Linux operating system and Solaris 9. However, John Groenveld, an associate research engineer at Pennsylvania State's Applied Research Lab and the author of the open letter, said the move was "off the mark".

"What they are doing is they are pigeonholing the product," Groenveld said. "When Solaris for x86 was first released, it worked on a very wide variety of hardware... from laptops to big servers. Over the past three years they have shrunk the number of systems."

Sun's move to nix the lowest end of Solaris-capable systems comes as the company fights against the encroachment of the Linux operating system and Microsoft. Linux has beaten out Solaris in several visible instances, including a revelation by Amazon.com almost a year ago that the company had moved over to Linux from Solaris.

"This was a very, very difficult decision in very difficult times," said Bill Moffitt, Solaris product line manager for Sun Microsystems. "It doesn't bring as much return per dollar as compared to other places that we could spend that money. In times of reduced operating budget, we have to go with things that have better business cases."

Sun manufactures the hardware and develops the operating system and software for its high-end products, making them by far more profitable than software-only products such as Solaris for x86, now under price pressure because of the popularity of the open source Linux operating system.

In January, Sun announced it would delay releasing an Intel-capable version of its newest operating system, Solaris 9. When the company did that, it broke a promise to its users, Groenveld said.

"Sun's tradition is to announce its end-of-life statements in release notes," he said, explaining that "they will have notes that tell you hardware that will not be supported in the future".

Sun first supported the x86 architecture in May 1993, when it shipped Solaris 2.1.

Robert Lemos writes for CNET News.com.