[conspire] Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):

> Wall Street is often caught flat footed.

Wall Street has myopia of coke-bottle-glasses-sized proportions, 
can't see past the next quarterly projection, and still thinks that
linear extrapolation is a nifty idea.  ;->

[Snip many interesting and worthwhile observations, which are
appreciated.]

> Sun open sourced OOo.  That is what I meant by a "gift".  Sun could 
> have let StarOffice (SO) rot on the shelf, or just stay in house to 
> reduce the number of copies of Microsoft Office that they would 
> have had to use. 

Christian, it _is_ a fairly standard competitive tactic to poison the
profitability of your competitors' cash-cow.  Motives don't really
matter a lot in the longer term (to re-flog a dying equine from the
prior thread, a bit), but underwriting OO.o does make perfect sense as a
Machiavellian shaft-the-other-guys tactic.

Microsoft was trying to destroy Sun's oxygen supply by attacking the
server market with NT/W2k/XP server variants -- or would have, if Linux
hadn't blown them almost entirely out of that submarket.  Sun retaliated
by, among other things, buying Star Division and producing proprietary
and open-source variants of StarOffice to attack MS-Office profits.

It's a logical response, and, as a Friend of Papa Darwin, I rather
admire it.

> Also, I appreciate a diversified market.  I think that it really 
> takes balls to stand up to Microsoft, and I think that we currently 
> would all be in deep doo-doo if Sun hadn't open sourced OOo.

Well, as someone who hasn't run a Microsoft OS since WfW 3.11, and blew
away his last proprietary-OS box in '95 (OS/2 3.0 Warp), I have some
perspective on that question.

I recall .doc and .xls getting partly or wholly reverse-engineered 
from time to time, and implemented in various open source (e.g., catdoc)
and proprietary (e.g., ApplixWare) software suites -- but we never
relied on it staying that way for long, because Microsoft Corporation
could always change the rules by issuing new software versions
implementing a new and incomprehensible file format spec, with backwards
but not forwards compatibility.  And note that there might be patent
encumbrances -- in which case, no interoperability for up to 20 years.

So, we never relied on it.  Every time we'd hear some newcomer say "At
last!  We can now read/write .doc files reliably on Linux!", we'd reply
"Well, _today_ you can.  For the longer term, nothing _really_ will
change until/unless we can convince businesses that MS-Office formats
are not a 'standard', and never were."

My feelings on the matter are unchanged.  It's spiff that OO.o can read
the primary MS-Office formats -- today -- but nothing real's going to
change unless/until (e.g.) the OASIS file formats are accepted as a
_real_ standard, and MS-Office's unstable crappo formats are given the
heave-ho as they should have been twenty years ago.

In light of that, we of the Linux world enjoyed whatever MS file
compatibility came our way, but resolved to live without it whenver it
didn't.  And yes, that _often_ meant mailing back file attachments to
their senders saying "Please send me something readable and not
proprietary gibberish."

I've seen how businesses use SO and OO.o -- as cheap .doc / .xls / .ppt
interpreters.  Hell, that's not even a _quarter_ of a loaf.  To me, the
situation still looks almost like 1995 with people's copies of
ApplixWare 4.4.1 -- except that certain people are even more delusional.

> AbiWord was not good enough and still is not good enough for the
> mainstream.

And yet, it came out of nowhere at amazing speed, and implemented
_first_ many of the improvements that are now widely claimed as OO.o
advantages.  Without gobbling all the system RAM and camping out on half
a gig of disk space, unlike some programs one might mention.  You want
someone to thank, start with SourceGear Corp. and the AbiWord community.

> We can anticipate a very very vicious fight from this vicious
> monopolist, and IMHO we need corporate allies to do it.  

So, what does Sun do when Microsoft deploys the patented file formats?
Me, I'm simply not relying on the much-vaunted .doc/.xls/.ppt abilities,
for that reason and others.

> Would I have preferred to see Sun have opened Solaris from the 
> beginning on the GPL?  Yes.  

I was actually among the people Sun consulted on licensing.
(Regrettably, I didn't have time to help them.)  People kept asking me,
"Is Sun going to GPL Solaris?"  I had to tell them I was not privileged
to reveal anything I knew about Sun's plans -- but that simple logic
should tell them that GPLing was completely out of the question:
There's a tremendous amount of third-party proprietary code in Solaris,
both on the kernel and elsewhere.  _Obviously_, alleged GPL permission
rights on a work that would be heavily linked to proprietary codebases
would make no sense at all.  (So, I could answer that question without
any reference to CDDL.)

> Would I like to see Sun open source Java under a GPL license?  Yes.
> Am I grumpy at Sun because they have not open sourced Java?  No.

On the one hand, it's certainly their right.  On the other, their tactic
was completely ineffective at preventing Microsoft Corp. from developing
a competing package that subverted the Java "standard":  That's what J++
was, remember?  It wasn't proprietary licensing that stopped that
particular tactic; it was litigation and subsequent intervention by the
court on contract grounds.

Nothing restrains Microsoft from doing a fully independent
implementation of their own JVM and using it to sabotage Sun's standard
-- other than their conviction that it's easier and more effective to
push C#/.Net, instead.

Given all that, Sun's justifications for not copylefting its JVM on
grounds that "Microsoft could fork it" seem completely phoney.
Microsoft probably wouldn't especially _want_ a copylefted fork, and
(more to the point) nothing in this picture would prevent them from
rolling their own, anyway.

> Market pressures will eventually force Sun to open source Java ONLY IF
> Microsoft doesn't first kill Sun and stomp on open source.  

This implicitly acknowledges what we old-timers realised about Sun's
proprietary JVM code from the get-go:  _If_ Sun goes belly-up -- or for
any other reason withdraws the software from availability, its users are
screwed.  We learned that lesson from various incarnations of the
Microsoft treadmill, we learned that from ApplixWare for Linux, we
learned that from OS/2, we learned that from Corel WordPerfect for
Linux, we learned that from BitKeeper -- and thus we don't need to be
cluebatted any more before realising that it applies to Sun Java, too.

> Microsoft will spend billions trying to push OSS and OSS vendors 
> off of the map, as they did with WP, a former market leading 
> program.  

AbiWord is now a terrific .wpd editor, by the way.  Or so says the
maintainer of the WordPerfect for Linux FAQ, whoever he is:
http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/

And, being genuinely open source -- without any proprietary pieces
sneaked into it -- AbiWord will remain that in perpetuity.  You and I
call that "software freedom".  If you wish to explain that to a
businessman, call it "control of IT risk".  Same thing, different
wording.  Eric explained that:  

http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/344/LWD000913expo00/pfindex.html

> I like having Sun in our camp, and I like having Sun dependent on the
> success of Open Solaris and OOo / SO as part of its future biz plans.  

What prevents it from end-of-lifing SO?  What prevents it from
abandoning Java?  Proprietary software has come to a screeching halt
before; it's an inherent problem.