Interview With Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz

Engadget recently grabbed a few minutes with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. They were able to get some great information on the JavaFX Mobile platform as well as Java on the iPhone and how the struggle against Microsoft is going with respect to open source.

Comments

Re:i have a better question

[davecb]

Huh? Judge Kimball might rule that SCO
ripped off Sun, but not that Sun didn't
buy licences from Bell back when they
together wrote Solaris 2 (Solaris 1 was
BSD, you may remember, for which you
still had to buy a Bell 32V license)

--dave

jPhone

[weston]

"the Sun software apparently looked eerily like the Apple iPhone's software; in fact, the platform Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed off is already being dubbed "jPhone" based on the striking resemblance to Apple's goods.... Scott McNealy alluded to the copying of Apple's modus operandi by wearing a black t-shirt..."

It doesn't surprise me when I see Apple-Sun coherence or imitation. Schwartz's roots are in NeXTStep/Cocoa development. I'm actually surprised there isn't more with Schwartz at the helm.

Can Java help Sun's bottom line?

[bignetbuy]

2500 people laid off and dismal stock price. Off 3% just today.

Re:i have a better question

[njcoder]

But Novell already stated they won't be pursuing Unix copyrights. So OpenSolaris has nothing to fear, which is what the original poster was trying to imply.

Re:Sun...

[njcoder]

MySQL had a sketchy open source relationship long before Sun were in talks to acquire them. The comments that Sun is close sourcing MySQL is disingenuous. Nothing is being "closed", just that some new features may not be released in the community edition. This was true before the acquisition. The Monitor product is one example. MySQL Cluster was also originally developed for paying customers first, then eventually opened.

There is nothing stopping someone from developing similar features in MySQL's GPL'd code base. Open Source is supposed to be about give and take, not just expecting some company to pay for all the development itself and give it all away for free.

My point is that Sun isn't doing anything really different from what MySQL AB was doing. Which is why I mainly use PostgreSQL.

Re:As the first SCMAD (in my country?) i just woul

[njcoder]

There's plenty of denying that.

Sure you can deny the sky is blue if you wanted to as well. However an independent study created for the EU says otherwise.

The study also backs up Sun Microsystemsâ(TM) claim to be the biggest donator of open source code. The top ten business contributors were as follows:

1 Sun Microsystems 51,372 Person-months 312m euros
2 IBM 14,865 Person-months 90m euros
3 Red Hat 9,748 Person-months 59m euros
4 Silicon Graphics 7,736 Person-months 47m euros
5 SAP 7,493 Person-months 46m euros
6 MySQL 5,747 Person-months 35m euros
7 Netscape 5,249 Person-months 32m euros
8 Ximian 4,985 Person-months 30m euros
9 Realnetworks 4,412 Person-months 27m euros
10 AT&T 4,286 Person-months 26m euros Also from here.

"Did you know that Sun contributes more than $200 million per year of intellectual property to the open source movement, in dozens of open source projects? The companyâ(TM)s historical contribution tops $2 billion. WOW!" A list of some of the open source projects Sun contributes to can be found on that link.