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Ex-Sun CEO Warns Oracle of Death By Open Source
gearystwatcher writes "Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks to The Reg on where things went wrong, and acquisition by Oracle: 'We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share,' McNealy said. 'You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow.'"
Definitely, if all the valuable assets of your business is in software (Solaris, StarOffice, Java, etc) and you give away such software for free then your business does not make sense at all.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The mistake they made was that they forgot (or didn't know how) to monetize the open source solutions they had. OpenSolaris was great, Java was great, OpenOffice was great but there was no option to buy support or custom development for those products. The only way was to go with closed Solaris and StarOffice which were quite different products and required IT folks to migrate. Basically they pushed OpenSolaris as a development vehicle for their closed Solaris which made for a bunch of OpenSolaris installs way ahead and more feature-rich (patch-wise) than Solaris, migrating back was a pain (or impossible if you upgraded your ZFS pools), installing Sun software on it was a pain.
If anything I would say they didn't open source enough of their products for it to be a success. OpenSolaris would've been great in a well-marketed product like Nexenta did - take the closed source out of it, allow for the great amount of Linux software to run directly on it and make it easy as Ubuntu. But their stock repositories were crap and hard to find requiring signing up to get keys or stick to the handful of community repos. Their HA and Storage solutions are still the best you can find in the market but again, hard to install on OpenSolaris and not very compatible with other software and systems.
Their hardware was also overpriced which pushed them right out of the market. I can understand the higher pricing on their SPARC products but not for their generic x86 systems.
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That's strange. Red Hat does all via Open Source and is about to pass the $1 Billion mark. Sounds like to me McNeally was a very poor CEO and it had nothing to do with the things they Open Sourced.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
It's more that Linux became "good enough" for a lot tasks and was cheaper. Having worked around both, Solaris still has features that if it's needed are worth the money.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
IBM has seen open source as a means of creating "solutions" for customers not a money maker in of itself. Ibm views linux as a sturdy and inexpensive tool that it can spend money to become very expert at. Sun sells expensive tools, IBM sells solutions to customers needs using inexpensive tools. That is why IBM is very very rich.
Interestingly, IBM and Oracle got more value out of using Java than Sun did by writing it. That appears to have been one of the decision points for Oracle.
One of the extra advantages of Linux for IBM was that it offered a new OS for the 390s, and of a very popular flavor. Sun already had a Unix OS for SPARC, so they didn't get the added value.
Sun was, IMHO, always a "BSD vs Bell" shop: they understood the struggle to free BSD, and learned how to deal with Bell and the commercial world, but that's where they stopped.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net