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Sun Spokesman Says "We Screwed Up On Open Source"
An anonymous reader sends along a video from Builder AU, in which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps describes 2001-2002 as 'a period where Sun 'screwed up' in their dealings with the open source community. Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
Thank you Sun for all the great products that you have open sourced. Unlike your competitors, you have outsourced your crown jewels.
Phipps says that Sun is trying to remedy the situation with the open sourcing of Java, Solaris, and the rest of Sun's software."
GPLing ZFS would go a long way with me!
To be fair they wanted to open source the code in Q4 1999, however their Java ftp client just finished loading a few months ago so they couldn't upload the code until just now.
Oh, I'd say 2008 is shaping up quite nicely to be one of the worst years in their history. The huge revenue miss in Q3, combined with the total lack of organic revenue growth, the continued exodus of top execs, and the pending layoff of up to 3000 employees doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Sun.
Ponytail-guy and his pals have basically given away the crown jewels and have not been able to "monetize" any sort of decent return for their efforts. The company can't sell servers, gives away software, and keeps purging the budget of the services and marketing teams that are the only pathway left for revenue growth. Geniuses.
I love Sun, I love their software, and they even have some really impressive hardware, but the management team there is absolutely clueless about how or where to take the company. The bets they made on open source and other areas are clearly not paying off. The stock is as low as it has ever been over the past 8 years and is showing no signs of life.
It is utterly depressing to see such a great company go down like this.
the continued exodus of top execs
This might prove to be a very good thing!http://ebgp.net/ccc/
I appreciate how much effort it must have taken for Sun to move this far on open source. Nevertheless, I think Sun is still screwing up.
Solaris, for example, is being positioned as an alternative to Linux: it's "pick us or pick Linux". From an open source point of view, it would be better if Sun picked a license that allowed the best parts of Solaris and Linux to be combined, and for end users to decide what those best parts are.
For Java, Sun still has most of the control, they have torpedoed attempts to certify Apache-licensed implementations as Java compliant, and their dual licensing scheme for Sun Java means that the project just isn't run the way an open source project ought to be run.
In the short term, Sun's behavior is disruptive for open source, but sadly not in the positive newspeak sense, but in the sense of merely annoying a lot of people for no good reason.
In the long term, Sun is going to lose with Solaris and Java if they persist in their take-it-or-leave-it approach to open source. If they want the technologies to survive in some form, they need to allow a mix-and-match approach; that's what open source is really all about.
IcedTea is based on OpenJDK, released by Sun.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Sun has tens of thousands of employees, many exclusively engaged in software development. They've had many rounds of layoffs before and since 2001. They looked at Linux vendors such as Red Hat and saw they were much smaller. Have you ever had to meet a payroll? It's easy to sit back and say, this company should do this, should've done that, they should get a new business model.
The wrong decision can sink a company. Look at Sybase - they were one of the hottest RDBMS vendors in the late '80s. Then they ran into a cash shortfall and had to make a source code licensing deal with Microsoft. Now Microsoft has the majority of the SQL Server business that Sybase once had, even though Sybase still has joint ownership of the source code. Yes, there are plenty of nice people out there willing to roll up their sleeves and help, but there are also plenty of un-nice people who will take what you've got and use it to push you aside.
They open sourced their compiler, virtual machine and most of their libraries before IcedTea was started according to wikipedia. And how would you say they can be coerced? It's not like their entire revenue is based off open-source, so I don't see any distinct advantage open-sourcing would give Sun
They are coerced into behaving nicely by the huge open source community which is not that much interested in what they have to offer anymore and have a lot of influence in the market
Not really. Java still dominates the enterprise application market (the only place it ever made any money for Sun), and its open source status is likely to have little effect on this. Even without ZFS being open-sourced, Solaris would still have a world leading file system. And I don't see where any pressure at all came from for them to open source the design of their UltraSparc T1 and T2 processors. Sun have been progressively opening more and more of their key business IP, and as far as I can see the only reason they have done so is that they really believe in the benefits of open source.
Sun has, and has had, some great products in the past, and some of their hardware is still pretty excellent, but the problem with the company is that they still have a deep rooted protectionist attitude towards SPARC and Solaris. Why do you think it took so long to get Solaris on x86, why it took so long for Sun to accept that x86 servers was where the growth was, why most of Sun's customers still get Linux pre-installed on Sun's systems and why Sun paid a couple of billion for an excellent business opportunity in Cobalt, and then promptly destroyed it?
If they could make Solaris and SPARC stand out and pay off then fine, but they can't hence the half-hearted and pretty sad move to 'open source' Solaris just so all their consultants and execs can run around trying to tell us that it's 'just like Linux'. However, in the cold hard light of day, Linux ate Solaris's lunch, and SPARC just competes too closely with x86 based servers without the comparable performance. SPARC is so inferior to x86 in terms of raw performance it's so laughable. Solaris also suffers from the fact that Sun just don't have the resources to push development to where Linux and other operating systems are, and these days it is increasingly expensive to try and maintain an entire OS yourself.
In terms of open source, Sun's problem is that the vast majority of open source software is written for Linux and the BSDs first. No one thinks of Solaris as their first platform of consideration, and it's difficult to see why they should do so now. It's still like that now, and it was still like that a few years ago when a former employer scratched its head trying to work out why Zope and Python performance was so terrible on Solaris and an UltraSPARC. A Sun guy even recompiled Python in Forte. The bottom line answer we got from the Python devs was "We use open source systems, and possibly Windows, first and foremost on x86 systems, x86 and Linux performs better anyway, and while we'd like to help, we just don't care about your corner case problem on an OS and hardware we don't have access to and can't reproduce. Just use Linux and x86". That's not literal, but it's the general gist, and I couldn't say I blamed them.
The solution? They moved to a far cheaper x86 system with Linux, they had no installation problems with Python as it came within the package management system itself, things were far easier to manage, performance increased exponentially which pleased everyone and Python and Zope ran with no issues whatsoever. That still holds true today.
Look at this post here from Groklaw, reviewing the testimony from the SCO v Novell trial.
PJ notes that SCO enacted a license, illegally according to Novell, with Sun in 2003 that allowed Sun to open source Unix Sys V. Knowing they had that, Sun still allowed SCO to embark on their SCOSource campaign against IBM and Linux users for allegedly putting Sys V code into Linux.
Even if Sun as a corporate entity disappears, though, I'm sure that their influence will continue to be felt. Look at Netscape. Really, they only had two significant products (which came in one package): Navigator and JavaScript. Now, Netscape is no more, but Navigator lives on as Mozilla/Gecko and JavaScript as ECMAScript, and both of those technologies have been essential to the "2.0"ing of the web.
Sun created Java, which (love it or hate it) is still being taught as part of the core curriculum in many computer science programs. And SunOS/Solaris and its many associated technologies are being integrated into many places (PAM, DTrace, ZFS, and so on). If you have experience with any of Sun's technologies, you know they're not perfect, but they're damn well thought out, and they make many parts of your daily work easier.
I hope Sun weathers these changes-- they're one example of a company that saw a coming shift in the business of selling computers and software, and instead of lobbying the government to prop up their failing business model, instead changed their business model. There's plenty left for Sun to fix in their company-- e.g., have they opened up their hardware documentation yet? (we would probably buy Sun hardware if we could run other OSes, fully-supported on it). But it would be a shame to see such an innovator go the way of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc, etc, etc...
Yeah, they screwed up big time. Groklaw has a nice article up on their involvement with SCO:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080625020853732
And they are still screwing up. Just have a look at the legal agreement you need to agree to when downloading even the *specification* from any of the Java Community Process groups where the project lead works for Sun. Evil and completely unacceptable terms for open-source developers...
And in those projects where they have released the source under a free license, they still keep an iron hand on the development process. So unless you work for sun, you need to beg to get your changes in (and sign all sorts of agreements). Closed bug-reporting systems. Version-control repositories that you need to apply to get read-only access to. Closed mailing lists. Design meetings held in person (Sun employees only of course).
This is a company that has a *long* way to go before they understand what Open Source is about.
Or, less charitably, this is a company that does indeed understand what open-source is about and is manipulating the system. Yes, once the source is released a fork is then possible, but for a large project inertia and an existing pool of developers all from one company make that something that takes real anger to do. So the changes Sun has made so far don't achieve a whole lot; they still completely control the direction their open-source projects take.
Real OSS companies are different; they contribute upstream, allow derivatives downstream, and are open in their process. A whole world of difference. See RedHat for a good example.
Speaking as a Sun employee: you're welcome.
But do remember that there's an element of self-interest in this open-sourcing strategy. It's all part of our fiendish plot to sell people hardware and services.
Take Solaris, for example. By opening it up, we do lose the income we would have had from selling it to people. But that's been dwindling anyway, as Solaris loses ground against Linux and Windows. By opening up the OS, we make it a better product through user contributions, and encourage its spread. More Solaris users means more people who will seriously consider out products and services.
Of course, even Linux and Windows people should be looking at us anyway, since we are now serious about products that run those OSs. (I work on documenting several of them.) But if you're already a Solaris user, then your options go beyond our x64 systems to the systems that are still the core of our business: the SPARC machines.
There are many reasons SPARC systems have been losing ground. But a big one is that they don't run "standard" operating systems. Promoting Solaris through open-sourcing (and through other means, such as supporting it on other vendor's hardware) drastically changes that particular equation.
In 2000-2001
1. They screwed up by announcing the end of line for Solaris on X86
2. They screwed up by refusing to offer X86 hardware.
3. They screwed up by not offering Linux on any of their hardware
4. They screwer up by not open sourcing Java, Solaris, and other goodies.
In the end, they are trying to correct all those errors, but I wonder whether doing that 7-8 years later means that they missed a golden opportunity to become a leader in the Linux and Unix software and hardware market (including on X86).