Sun chief executive Scott McNealy said his company’s close relationship with Larry Ellison’s Oracle in the areas of consulting, software porting and platform optimization means that Sun could see increased business from an acquired PeopleSoft.

McNealy added that IBM, meanwhile, risks seeding uncertainty among customers of its AIX Unix should it ship continue to ship the operating system after SCO yanks its licensing agreement.

McNealy, speaking at JavaOne 2003, gave his thoughts on two of the industry’s biggest and bitterest legal disputes – Oracle’ attempt to buy PeopleSoft for $16.00 per share and SCO Group Inc’s $1bn legal claim against IBM over Unix alleged intellectual property violation.

PeopleSoft is an IBM partner, and McNealy said if Ellison is successful in his bid, Sun’s relationship with Oracle could result in a greater number of PeopleSoft installations running on Sun’s Solaris, servers and Java instead of IBM-based systems.

We have to compete for PeopleSoft’s love with IBM. Competing for PeopleSoft’s love after [acquisition] would be a lot easier.

Oracle is a top tier external partnership. When Oracle has new functionality we are going to be the most ported to and the most targeted platform for their software.

If Larry bought SAP, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft that would be good for us because it means that stuff will run on Solaris and Java.

SCO, meanwhile, is today expected to announce whether it has decided to withdraw IBM’s AIX Unix license. SCO threatened to yank IBM’s license unless it complied with a series of demands protecting its alleged trade secrets and intellectual property in Unix. IBM had until midnight on Friday to comply and as the deadline approached the company was thought unlikely to meet SCO’s demands.

McNealy said a decision by SCO to cancel the licensing agreement would create uncertainty, as IBM would ship an unauthorized version of Unix.

He added Sun’s own Unix, Solaris, was fully owned by Sun and that users are indemnified against potential action from SCO. There’s zero uncertainty around Solaris, McNealy said.

Source: Computerwire