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

Typical Schwartz

[swordgeek]

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.

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.

Re:i have a better question

[njcoder]

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.

So here's a question for the FOSS world

[weston]

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.

Re:Sun...

[njcoder]

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.