[conspire] Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

[Adrien Lamothe]

Since the thread is several levels deep, I'll just cut
and paste. Quoting Christian:

"Ultimately, I believe that open source is as
unstoppable as a rising tide.  I believe that we will
see gcj and other open solutions to the Java problem. 
I do believe that Simon Phipps cares about open
source, but he, like others at Sun, are trying to
figure out a graceful way to recover from the
disruptive Linux wave that has hammered Sun. Linux is
in the process of mauling Sun the same way that the
telephone mauled Western Union and transistors mauled
RCA. They are disruptive technologies, and I believe
that Sun is trying to cope with the demands of Wall
Street to ride out this Linux tsunami."

-- There are several factors affecting Sun's
performance over the past several years, and Linux is
but one of them (and not necessarily the most
significant.)

-------------------------------------------------------

"...  But the problem is that right now, Wall Street
still has not understood how to open source will fit
into the business environment, other than the areas
where Apache and Linux have already become
established."

-- Wall Street knows that any technology which lowers
the cost of doing business will benefit those
businesses able to utilize it. It may hurt some
technology companies, but that's life in the business
world, some businesses gain at the expense of others.

-------------------------------------------------------

"I think that Simon really believes that IBM could
grab open source code and wield its market power,
regardless of the fact that the code is open.  This is
the nature of his stated concern with the GPL.  I
think that where Simon is mistaken is that is the
power of forking.  Jack Messman was right.  You can't
stop the tide."

-- IBM has already done this, by porting Linux to the
mainframe. One could argue that Linux actually saved
IBM in the late 90s when Sun was selling E-10,000s
like hotcakes. IBM has leveraged open-source in other
ways and will continue to do so.

-------------------------------------------------------

"But I do think that we should have more sympathy and
gratitude for Sun.  It did create OOo, which is a
marvelous gift to the world, and Java will never be a
.Net lockdown.  My only concern is that Sun will not
open source Java in time, and something else will come

along that is truly open, and Sun will be left
clinging to a proprietary commodity whose time has
come and gone."

-- Sun didn't create OpenOffice. OpenOffice is the
free version of StarOffice, which Sun (very wisely)
acquired from StarDivision. Sun has retained engineers
to continue development of StarOffice & OpenOffice.
Sun didn't do this to give a "marvelous gift to the
world;" they did it as a strategic move against
Microsoft. MS Office accounts for 20% or more of
Microsoft's revenue and is a big reason businesses use
Windows.


This has been a very entertaining discussion. Thanks
guys.

-- Adrien






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