Schwartz to IBM: Don't lock us out

In Sun President Jonathan Schwartz's latest blog entry, he used the medium to castigate IBM for standing in the way of Solaris 10 deployments in large financial services companies:

But what's been really interesting is noticing who's not necessarily been so supportive of helping us drive more opportunity with our financial services customers: IBM. Yup, IBM's deployed in a number of customer accounts we share, and with the rapid uptake of Solaris 10 in early access, some customers have been running into dependencies - from MQSeries to Tivoli, Rational to DB2 - that stand in the way of their deploying Solaris. What's IBM's stance on Solaris 10? "There's no demand." Please. We know groups of our customers have called in directly to IBM seeking Solaris 10 porting dates - and heard the same story, "you're the only customer that wants it."

Which frankly, is pretty infuriating. A few of those customers have said it feels like the "old IBM," the anti-competitive monolith that attempted to "lock and block" customers into proprietary IBM solutions. So if you run into an IBM representative, make sure to let them know you, too, would like to be considered the "only customer that wants it." More seriously, that they shouldn't attempt to lock customers in.

Come on, IBM, you've got nothing to fear - Solaris is open source, it's cross platform. It's even indemnified. And here's some free advice: you can't lock customers in. They always, always, have a choice. Personally, I wouldn't tempt them to exercise it.

I don't think IBM is quaking in its boots, but Schwartz calling out IBM in a public blog for allegedly locking out Sun and disrespecting customer wishes sounds like challenge to a public duel.