"We think there's ample opportunity to work together out there," said Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, this week as Sun indicated the thawing of its long-standing chilly relations with Linux vendor Red Hat.

Only a year ago, things were very different: "Red Hat is not linux, despite what they say, and despite what the media (and IBM's ads) seem to conflate," blogged Schwartz back then.

"To my friends in the media," Schwartz protested in September 2004, "you are confusing a social movement with a single company - that social movement is all about choice, innovation and freedom. Not dominance or dependence."

Now, in contrast, Sun has extended its Red Hat support contract to its new enterprise x64 servers, launched yesterday at Sun's quarterly event, Network
Computing '05 (NC05Q3), in New York City.

"Never before in Sun's history have AMD, Microsoft, MySQL, Oracle and Red Hat stood behind a new line of products from Sun," Schwartz said Monday.