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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.
First of all, this was on Engadget Mobile, so it's strictly limited to porting Java to portable devices.
That said, here's a typical question:
"Jonathan, we have videotape of you mooning the CEO of Apple and saying "Not until after hell freezes over you SOB." This seems to indicate some difficulties in getting Java on the iPhone."
"Absolutely not! There aren't any technical challenges to porting Java. We can completely get it done man, just as long as Apple doesn't screw around again. There are no technical problems. Technical issues aren't there. Nope. No way."
The sooner someone smashes that pony-tailed freak in, the better.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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
davecb@spamcop.net
"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.
Tweet, tweet.
Sun's identity crisis is not new. "We're a hardware company! No, Software! Software! We're pro-open source. Except when we buy an open source company like MySQL, then we like to close things off. We also love Linux! No, Solaris! We wish you all would love Solaris like you love Linux. Why can't you love us?"
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
2500 people laid off and dismal stock price. Off 3% just today.
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix. Whether SCO had a right to sell licenses isn't the issue. SCO was supposed to sell licenses, send 100% of the license fee to Novell and Novell would send SCO back 5% which was their fee for acting as the licensing agent. The only thing Novell is saying is that SCO didn't give them the money. That's not Sun's fault.
If you go to a store and purchase something, you give the cashier the money, but the cashier puts it in their pocket instead of the register, the store owner can't come take what you purchased away from you.
From my limited understanding, I think it wasn't just SYSV licenses Sun purchased. SCO had a good product called UnixWare that had very good driver support in the x86 world. I think I remember reading somewhere that part of Sun's licensing deal with SCO was for drivers, which I would assume were for SCO's UnixWare and not just for Unix SYSV licenses. So what SCO owes Novell for what Sun paid them, may not be the entire amount.
Regardless, I highly doubt Sun wouldn't indemnify the OpenSolaris community. They indemnify customer's they sell RedHat and SuSE to. So to even think they wouldn't indemnify users of their own codebase is just ridiculous.
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Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?
I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.
I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.
There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.
Tweet, tweet.
Yes, hard to believe that a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees would choose to focus on more than just one product. I guess companies like HP, Apple and IBM must have this same identity crisis?
I can just picture you running into your local Staples and yelling "Make up your mind! Are you a pen store or a staples store?"
As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. The things that were available under the GPL licenses will always be available. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them.
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You must be new here.
This is Slashdot, not Mensa. BIG difference!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix.
What exactly they were to be the licensing agent for is one of the things that's under question.
If you go to a store and purchase the cash register, and the cashier puts the money in his pocket, that doesn't necessarily mean you get to keep the cash register.
Was "the right to sell transferrable source licenses" one of the things that SCO had the right to sell to Sun?
Well, if SCO has to pay Novell 2 million, then I guess Novell has accepted the money for the cash register. If SCO has to give it back to Sun, then Novell gets to go after Sun. If SCO gets to hang onto it, who knows?
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.
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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.
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I happen to like Swartz. I think he inherited some corporate culture relics that he would rather do without.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
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.
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