Save-Solaris.ORG

March 21, 2002

To the Board of Directors:

We are writing to you today because of your position on Sun Microsystems' board of directors. Over the last three months, thousands of members of Sun's user community have attempted to contact Sun's management and explain how two announcements risk permanently damaging the company's relationship with its customers. To date, we have seen no evidence that Sun is committed to resolving our complaints or even understands the gravity of the problem. You may be our last hope and we implore you to bring our case to Sun's executive officers.

On January 8^th, Graham Lovell, director of product marketing for Solaris, announced in the on-line trade press that Sun has indefinitely delayed Solaris 9 x86. These reports immediately created a large backlash amongst Sun's most loyal customers and advocates. On January 10^th, the user community drafted an open letter to Sun attempting to summarize the various reactions to this announcement. You may read a copy at our web-site, http://www.save-solaris-x86.org/.

To Sun's credit, by January 11^th, Mr. Lovell offered to host at Sun's headquarters a face-to-face meeting of managers from the software division and a group of representatives of the user community. On February 11^th, the community representatives met with Anil Gadre, Vice President of Solaris Software and other managers from the software division. The representatives were extremely forthright about the nature of our complaint and severity of the ill will Sun generated among its customers. The group suggested several potential remedies. More importantly, they communicated the community's desire to move beyond our anger and frustration and to work with Sun in partnership. The group explained that the community only seeks to reach a solution which both redresses our complaint and allows Sun to fulfill its primary duty to its stockholders: to be profitable in all its endeavors. We have seen little progress from Sun and we fear that management still does not appreciate the value of the Solaris x86 product.

On February 7^th, Ed Zander, president of Sun Microsystems, announced that Sun intends to expand its line of Cobalt network appliances and ship a new line of servers based on the Linux operating system. Again, Sun created a large backlash amongst its most loyal customers. By March 19^th, Mr. Gadre and Stephen DeWitt, vice-president of Edge Services and former president of Cobalt Networks, attempted to clarify Sun's new Linux strategy. These follow-up statements do not adequately answer some very troubling questions from Sun's customers:

• During a period when Hewlett Packard's investors conducted a very public and fractious debate about the feasibility of expanding HP's presence in the highly competitive, low-margin commodity PC business, why does Sun think it can compete with IBM and Dell which already sell entry-level Linux servers?

• Why does Sun think it can be more successful than Silicon Graphics at selling and supporting multiple operating environments?

• Why should Sun embrace the Linux kernel when its owner, Linus Torvalds, has stated that Sun's Java technology is dead?

• Why should Sun tie itself to the GNOME user interface toolset when its principal contributor, Miguel de Icaza, prefers Microsoft's .NET infrastructure to SunONE?

• When will Sun acknowledge and attempt to mitigate the fact that by adopting Linux on the low-end, it lends creditability to its Linux-based competitors who tout that you can replace Sun's high-end servers with large clusters of low-end boxes?

• How does Sun plan to compete with IBM who can run these Linux clusters on top of its big-iron mainframes?

• When will Sun address the widespread perception in the industry that the large majority of Sun's engineers and managers believe that it already has a superior operating system in Solaris and why do they believe that customers will buy a Linux-based solution from a company who's heart and soul clearly is not in it?

For over ten years, Sun has invested in Solaris, creating the number one UNIX operating system. Solaris has become an asset to the company of equal or greater value to its SPARC and Java technologies. In fact, the fortunes of all of Sun's technologies are tied to the success of Solaris. Solaris, today, has the capability to run across the enterprise, from a Toshiba laptop to the 106 processor SunFire server. Shamefully, Sun has neglected and ignored its x86 version of Solaris, allowing it to be mismanaged and go under-utilized within the organization, at great cost to Sun's stockholders. For Sun's user community, it is infuriating to see managers and sales engineers deliver presentations using Microsoft Windows and Office on their laptops when Sun already owns an excellent alternative in Solaris and StarOffice. By departing from Solaris x86 and Sun's single operating environment across the enterprise strategy, Sun not only betrays a significant group of loyal customers, but abandons an effective strategy against IBM and Microsoft competitors.

We have identified a series of problems with Sun's new Linux strategy and numerous areas of Sun's current business practices which are in need of improvement. We have attempted to reach out to engineers and managers within Sun. While they are always sympathetic to our concerns, they seem powerless to address them, particularly when our complaint spans multiple departments or divisions. We know that with your help that they can be resolved in short order and that channels can be developed so that future customer complaints and employee concerns can be addressed more quickly.

Thank you.