Sun controls their kernel - Redhat does not.
Redhat is a packaging company in that they are re-releasing freely available components, some of which are extended or provided by Redhat.
Trouble is, of the packages listed on the Fedora contributions list, not all are applicable to the rest of the Linux companies. Novell/Suse suffer from the same lack of *complete* compatibility.
This point is moot when you think about the interoperability of Solaris packages or apps as applied to Linux, however.
Take a look at some of the videos of round table meetings of Sun engineers. It's immediately clear (to me) that the disconnects that exist in the Linux world wrt problem solving, best practice, and road maps are of a completely different nature, if they can even be compared directly.
Looking at Sun's hardware business, the width and breadth of that hardware, the services that run on them (it's still a Sun, IBM, and HP world within the Fortune 500), and this effieciency in communication and execution within Sun's OS division, it appears that Redhat is truly little more than a "packaging company" (with crummy package management)
Inflammatory, to be sure, but this is the big time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
