Last gasp of Sun's semi-openness

Throughout its lifespan, Sun always had a schizophrenic view of open standards. Some of the things it did were very open, like giving away specs and/or implementations of things like RPC and NFS. Some of the things were traditional proprietary licensing models — akin to Microsoft or Intel — with SPARC chips, Solaris and the like.

On the other hand, Sun’s use of open source was always semi-open, as I noted in 2003 in my most oft-cited open source paper. In fact, Sonali Shah (now of U. Washington) coined the term “gated source” to refer to Sun’s use of open source-like approaches inside an extranet during the past 15 years or so.

While Sun eventually embraced open source, its opening always seemed like too little, too late. Certainly during its entire lifespan, Sun’s was at best semi-open — a combination of (as I put it in my 2003 paper) “partly open” and “opening parts”.

The crown jewels of Sun during its final decade was the Java programming language. One offhand estimate I heard was that Sun spent more than $1 billion in R&D on Java before it was gobbled up by Oracle, but that number seems low.

Now Oracle (owner of Sun’s IP if few of its former leaders) is suing Google for its independent implementation of Java in the Android platform. Since neither the IP nor the alleged infringement has changed since the first Android phone shipped two years ago, the lawsuit seems driven more by the change in management than a change in IP use.

Oracle is represented by David Boies, who once helped sue Microsoft for antitrust violations but more recently represented SCO in its suit against Linux and IBM.

The Merc sees it as a negotiating ploy:

While Redwood Shores-based Oracle did not specify the amount of damages it will seek, one analyst said the stakes could be high. But he also suggested the lawsuit may be a strategic move by Oracle in the course of a larger negotiating effort.

"At the end of the day, it could mean a fair amount of money," said Al Hilwa, a software industry expert at the IDC tech research firm. Based on other similar past disputes, he added, it's likely that the two companies have been negotiating quietly for months.

"Going public with a lawsuit may well be part of a strategy by Oracle for trying to force the issue," Hilwa said.

In contrast, ComputerWorld quotes a Gartner analyst who (correctly) suggests that Oracle will have a hard time making a case:

When Google developed Android it included a Java compatible technology called Dalvik with the phone OS. Dalvik was developed as a "clean room" version of Java, meaning Google built it from the ground up without using any Sun technology or intellectual property, said Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.

"You can't just take a Java application from a Sun environment, where it's licensed, and run it on Android. You have to recompile it to Dalvik," Dulaney said.

The cleanroom process is almost 30 years old, used for hundreds of clones of the IBM PC, Adobe’s PostScript interpreter, and many other copryighted software technologies owned by litigious wealthy IT companies. When used properly, it is very effective — which is why Dell and HP are shipping more Wintel PCs than IBM, which dumped the business it created.

If Google used this process, Oracle faces a nearly impossible task of proving copyright infringement. If it didn’t — with all its brains and resources and lawyers and egos — then certainly it deserves to pay whatever a jury hands out in a courtroom.

In fact, Android does not have a complete Java implementation, but the Java language syntax with a different set of APIs that brought heartburn to Java programmers (and Sun).

I don’t know much about the Java patent portfolio, which is potentially a more seriously threat to Google since a cleanroom or independent invention is no defense for patent infringement.

I was curious to find no record of Sun asserting Java patents against other firms, at least openly. The only Java patent litigation I could find was a $92 million settlement in 2004 by Sun in favor of Kodak for Java infringing patents created by Wang Laboratories (and bought by Sun)

Certainly there have been at least limited Java clones, including HP’s MicroChai in 2001, which apparently shipped in a few HP devices.

So does Sun/Oracle have a weak case? Has it been using the patents behind the scenes to win royalties or eliminate competing Java implementations?

However, the fact that Sun has patents to assert over Java implementors shows that it always intended the Java platform to be semi-open, and that its abortive effort to make Java a truly open standard was never intended to give up control.

Total Eclipse of Sun

InfoWorld chronicles the technological brain drain at Sun Microsystems after it was gobbled up by Oracle:

Key departures have included Java founder James Gosling, XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer. After serving as CTO of client software at Sun, Gosling worked for a couple months with the same title at Oracle before leaving in April under what appears to be acrimonious circumstances. Bray, who was director of Web technologies at Sun, also quickly left Oracle, becoming a developer advocate at Google. Phipps, never offered a job at Oracle, is open source strategy director at integrator and identity platform vendor ForgeRock.

Other departures include Sun engineers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who shepherded the development of the JRuby programming language at Sun but joined Engine Yard last summer several months after the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced. A key developer on the open source Hudson continuous build project, Kohsuke Kawaguchi left in April to form a company to continue working on Hudson.

In his blog, Gosling even notes that he needed a lawyer to resign from Oracle:

Between all this [answering emails] and spending quality time with my lawyer, resigning has been a full time job (before I quit, several friends said I'd need a lawyer because "this is Oracle we're talking about"... sadly, they were right).

It is a sad commentary to say that Oracle is more bureaucratic than Sun, given Sun had become one of the most bureaucratic, least entrepreneurial tech companies in Silicon Valley.

It’s also telling that Oracle shareholders got a lot less technology than they were promised from the acquisition.

I wonder how much of a loss it really is to Oracle. First, while these were very capable people, they obviously weren’t enough to make Sun successful anymore. Was it because of a bad strategy? Lack of marketing? Or have the returns to innovation disappeared in the mature enterprise IT segment? I don’t know, but if the strategy had been working, Sun wouldn’t have needed to sell itself off.

Also, what use does Oracle have for innovation? Their focus is service, support, scope, reach, control, perhaps reliability. Again, the entire segment seems to be rewarding turnkey solutions — or successful lock-in strategies — rather than new technology.

Finally, I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Big acquisitions nearly always add revenue and destroy value.

Sun runs into IBM's arms

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reports this morning that IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems. Since the end of the dot-com bubble, the once-great company has fallen on hard times.

Sun twice was able to pull off a really clever positioning. First, they were the king of open — the leader of the Unix-based open systems movement. Unlike their competitors, they didn’t dabble in Unix but bet the whole company on it — and were particularly effective in using it to beat the once-great Apollo into waiting arms of HP. (This is the subject of a well-known academic paper by Raghu Garud and Arun Kumaraswamy). They also once had a large standardization organization, headed by my friend Carl Cargill, that played the standards game as well as anyone.

After that, Sun rode the dot-com wave better than anyone. If you were a VC-backed Internet startup in the 1990s, the first check with the VC money was to buy the Sun server so that you’d have something to deploy a production-quality 7/24 service. However, Intel spent hundreds of millions to create OSDL and target Sun’s core business with commodity Lintel boxes, and today such servers are more than adequate for most commercial purposes.

So with both the end of Internet growth and the commodization of Unix by Linux, Sun has been casting about for a third strategy. For almost a decade, Sun has been ambivalent about the open source tide that is ending its proprietary (if open standard) source of software differentiation.

It’s made big gambles (like a $1b on buying MySQL) to become more entrepreneurial and more aligned to open source, but the large established bureaucracy has rejected such outside influences. Despite ongoing layoffs, collapsing share prices and predictions of eventual failure, CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been no more effective than founder Scott McNealy at fundamentally transforming Sun into a lean, mean fighting machine.

The WSJ reports that the core turnaround strategy has changed:

In recent months, Sun has approached a number of large tech companies in the hopes of being acquired, said people familiar with the matter. The world's largest tech company, Hewlett-Packard Co., declined the offer, said a person briefed on the matter. A spokesman for Dell Inc., the world's third-largest server maker, declined to comment.

IBM seems like a good fit for Sun: if anyone has been able in the past decade to run an effective large IT company, IBM has. And now that Sun is a shell of their former greatness, most of the antitrust issues should be gone.

There is the question of East Coast vs. West Coast culture, but this does not seem like an example of such a disaster (as in my study of Linkabit’s 1980 acquisition). IBM is more innovation oriented than most East Coast firms, and Sun more bureaucratic than most West Coast firms.

IBM acquiring Apple in the 1990s would have been a disaster (but fortunately the self-serving Apple executives got greedy and demanded twice the price, paving the way for the Jobs II era).

Now Sun is in play, with its shares up 60% today. Its customers will reassured if it gets acquired and survives, and spooked if there are signs that the deal is going to fall through — leaving no other obvious edngame.

Sun bureaucracy rejects alien beings

My friend Matt Asay is reporting that MySQL CEO Maren Mickos is bailing from Sun Microsystems, a year after Sun paid $1 billion for the open source database company. This follows by four months the exit by one of the MySQL founders, and a goodwill writedown of sizable fraction of the purchase price. The other cofounder left last week.

Asay blames the departure on Sun bureaucracy

What Mickos doesn't say in the staff letter, but which I sensed in my conversation with him, is frustration at Sun's bureaucracy. As one of the most foundational personalities in open-source business, Mickos should have been given free rein to change Sun's fortunes. I don't think that he was given that freedom, based on other conversations I've had with Sun executives, and this clearly led to his desire to leave Sun.

There is no doubt that the Sun bureaucracy has been strangling the company since the end of the dot-com bubble, when it was perhaps hidden by Sun’s wild ride. While Asay refers to Mickos (who I met a few times) “the face of MySQL, but also of the rising open-source industry,” it’s clear that Mickos was never going to pull off a reverse takeover the way Steve Jobs did in 1997.

But I’d argue with Asay’s basic premise: Sun’s “open-source rebirth was just given a massive blow.” There was no rebirth and never would be. Exhibit A is Matt himself, who I met when he was the open source strategist for Novell. Novell did an exemplary job of acquiring Ximian and one of the open source industry’s superstars, founder Miguel de Icaza, and he still appears to be a Novell VP.

Linux revenues (from its SuSE acquisition) have grown to 16% of the company’s total in 2008. However, Novell hasn’t had a decent year since 2004, losing money in 2008, 2007, and 2005 (if you exclude the Microsoft settlement), and eking out a 2% profit in 2006 that was lost again in 2007.

If this is the best job of any incumbent in making the switch to open source, what hope did Sun have? (IBM is the exception that proved the rule: they had a senior exec who led a cultural shift nearly a decade ago).

So Sun may find its way out of the wilderness — even if the odds seem long. But MySQL isn’t going to do it, and I don’t think open source will either. Perhaps Sun’s future lies not in showing everyone it does commodity systems better than Dell, IBM or HP, but instead giving CIOs a reason again to pay a premium for its products. Apple’s done it in the consumer space, so perhaps Sun can pull it off for mission-critical enterprise IT.

Save your company or save the planet?

When running a company (like a household or a country), it’s important to distinguish between must-haves and nice-to-haves. The latter includes a lot of charitable activities, work in the community, parties, little morale-building perks, as well as many other things that help a firm with its image in the community or to attract good people.

When times gets tight for a company, or for an industry (think dot-com crash), or even the whole economy (i.e., now), a lot of nice-to-haves necessarily go out the window. So when one of my students who works at Cisco told me Friday that they cut out Red Bull to save money — complete with a memo explaining the cost-benefit analysis — we both agreed it made a lot of sense.

Certainly if times are supposed to be tight at a company, but instead it’s business as usual on spending, then employees will justifiably wonder how serious management is about tightening up and focusing on the job at hand.

This came to mind when reading this morning’s Merc:

Sun executives argue engineers must help larger society, not just business
By Brandon Bailey
Mercury News

Engineering isn't just engineering anymore. In the 21st century, according to an upcoming book by two senior engineers at Sun Microsystems, members of their profession must confront issues of environmental sustainability, intellectual property, economics and their own responsibilities as citizens of a global community.

"Citizen Engineer" was co-written by Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas, both electrical engineers and computer scientists who are, respectively, chief technology officer and chief sustainability officer for Sun. Papadopoulos is responsible for Sun's research and development efforts, while Douglas coordinates environmental programs and heads the company's cloud computing and developer platforms division.

The book is part primer and part argument. The authors say they wrote it for engineering students, professors and working engineers who, in Papadopolous' words, "have that idea that maybe they need to think more about what they're doing."

I realize that the book would have been written months or even a year or more ago, but still it suggests an utter lack of urgency for a company that’s in serious trouble and has been struggling for years.

I don’t blame the executives for wanting to pursue their pet projects — nor am I passing judgment on the merits of the new book — but I question the management that allowed (if not encouraged) this effort when the company is in a life-or-death crisis. If every employee, from top to bottom, does not have a single-minded focus on growing revenues, cutting costs and finding a way back to sustained profitability, then the company needs new leadership.

Sun just got two new directors nominated by angry investors, but Therese Poletti of MarketWatch argues that the company that brought us Java® needs a more drastic solution:

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's time for the board of directors at Sun Microsystems Inc. to wake up and smell the coffee.

Instead of adding two new independent directors to deal with the apparent downward spiral of the company's business, the board should look at replacing Sun's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, who got them into much of the mess in the first place.

...

Wall Street has put pressure on the company to cut costs more drastically and investors are impatient. Since Schwartz took over, the board authorized a 1-to-4 reverse stock split in November 2007. Its shares closed at $5.14 before the split took effect. After the split, its shares traded at $20.51. On Wednesday, its shares closed at $3.89, down more than 80%.

Sun announced another big round of 5,000 to 6,000 jobs last month, but some investors think they should do more. The company also took a big impairment charge for its $4.1 billion acquisition in 2005 of StorageTek, meaning the company is no longer worth what Sun paid.

"At this point the graveyard watch should be more aligned on how long Jonathan Schwartz keeps his job and how long Sun stays independent," added [analyst Charles] King.

Four dying SV companies

On Sunday, Chris O’Brien of the Merc wrote about four dying Silicon Valley icons. For some reason, it wasn’t posted to the website Sunday or Monday, but it’s there now. He aptly summarizes the problems of three of these companies, and I recommend anyone interested in innovation (or the Valley) to read the analysis.

In my reading, two of the companies are (effectively) single-product companies where their product is no longer compelling and increasingly no longer competitive. AMD once was threatening Intel on the performance front, and now they are asset stripping in hopes of raising enough cash to stay alive. Palm created the pen-based PDA and for a while was a leader in smartphones, but their Treo remakes have long since run out of steam and their last Hail Mary wasted precious time and money.

The other two companies are diversified systems companies which were built around the idea of integration and economies of scope. Their stories diverge somewhat, in that Sun Microsystems was the dominant firm in a category that’s been dying since the end of the dot-com era, while Yahoo is #2 in a category that’s still very much alive.

Still, there are important parallels. Sun has been cutting its way to greatness for years, and is still floundering in search of a strategy that will somehow make up for its loss of a raison d’être in a world of commodity Linux boxes. (Thank you, Intel).

Yahoo has only recent begun to emulate Sun by cutting its way to greatness — with cuts of 7% in February (announced in January) and 10% earlier this month announced back in October. Even their cutting is not being done well: pre-announcing them makes it like a water torture, and they are also cutting staff from its winners and not just deadweight.

However, Yahoo has been floundering for as long as Sun — ever since it hired Terry Semel back in 2001. Semel was cast off in 2007, but his successor hasn’t done any better.

O’Brien puts Yahoo in a separate category, because he thinks they will do a deal in Microsoft in 2009 that will pull them out of a tailspin. But I think Yahoo’s problems are systemic, and even if they make nice with Microsoft, that won’t substitute for a lack of a winning strategy.

So will Yahoo die in 2009? No, but neither will Sun: it has enough inertia (through enterprise sales contracts) to keep limping along for another decade or more, as did DEC and Unisys and Cray and SGI and all the other computer systems also-rans.

Still, if Yahoo doesn’t get a better CEO and better strategy, all its point successes (like Flickr and mobile) will be for naught.

How much did Sun lose on MySQL?

Sun Microsystems announced today that in its most recent quarter, it lost $1.67b on revenues of $2.99b. That’s a -56% net margin (if there were such a concept as negative margin), but only -5.6% without special charges. Compared to analyst expectations, the revenues were $150m low, as was the net income. Its gross margin also fell dramatically.

The NYT notes a consistent pattern of bad news

With falling revenue, problematic acquisitions, product slip-ups and a stock that has lost three-quarters of its value in the past year, the investment community is getting impatient with Sun’s management, including chief executive Jonathan Schwartz.

“Sun is a problem child, and the problem child has to change,” said Brent Bracelin, a hardware analyst for Pacific Crest Securities.

The Times estimates 40% of Sun’s total revenues come from financial services and telecommunications companies, two sectors that are now cutting back. Longtime CEO Scott McNealy was forced out 30 months ago because he never adjusted to the fact that the dot-com era was a one-time lucky break. So far, Jonathan Schwartz isn’t doing any better.

In today’s announcement, there is the minor problem of that $1.44 billion charge for “goodwill impairment” on unspecified business lines. There is no excuse for Sun’s obfuscation: the size of the charge is clearly material, while being truthful would not provide advantage to any competitor. Instead, it’s just management seeking to avoid accountability for its recent mistakes.

In particular, the presumption is that most (if not all) can be attributed to overpaying for two recent acquisitions, the $4.1b purchase of StorageTek in 2005 and the $1b purchase of MySQL (for 20x revenues) earlier this year.

On InfoWorld, MBA-touting blogger Savio Rodrigues estimated $2.48 billion in goodwill booked between the two sales. By his calculations, MySQL is 29% of the total, which (if pro rata is a fair allocation) would be a $420m charge on the purchase. Rodrigues reminds us that eBay took a $1.4b writeoff for its purchase of Skype.

The MySQL purchase was intended to give Sun a lynchpin role in the open source world. But the shift to get open source religion was too late. The acquisition isn’t going well for either side: Schwartz clearly overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars while MySQL is being strangled by the Sun bureaucracy.

Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I don’t see where Sun can go and how they can get there — or that they would ever do it, even if they knew where and how to go. By comparison, Motorola’s problems look easy: at least they’re in a growing market.

MySQL integration going badly

Sun bought MySQL earlier this year, providing a great exit strategy for the world’s largest dual-license open source software startup.

Surprise, surprise: one of the (suddenly richer) MySQL founders, David Axmark, has jumped ship:

I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.

Official MySQL blogger remarks notes that this is a major loss for the MySQL product and division.

Of course, this problem happens with any acquisition of a little company rather than a big company. Still, the, 26-year-old Sun seems to be more hierarchical and bureaucratic than its younger and more nimble Silicon Valley rivals (like the Monster of Mountain View). And, unlike Cisco, Sun has either not mastered (or chosen not to implement) autonomy for its spinout acquisitions.

Sun’s not so bold strategy

The headline on the front page of this morning’s Merc was about airline nickel-and-diming, but the lead headline on the business section was

Sun’s Strategy
‘bold’ and ‘risky’

I read the story — about Sun’s use of open source — and there was nothing bold about it.

Yes, Sun overpaid in blowing $1 billion on an open source database company that only generates $50 million/year in revenues. Perhaps I’d call that decision ‘bold and risky,’ but that’s old news.

What about open sourcing the rest of their code, including Solaris and Java? Sure, it would have been bold in 1998 or even 2001, but in 2007 or 2008? Not hardly.

By the time (2003) when we were doing our paper on Linux adoption, it was clear that Unix was being commoditized, and that cost-conscious buyers were increasingly unwilling to pay a premium for Sun’s products. Sun reminds me (to a lesser degree) of Digital Equipment, who came to us in March 2004 for advice on open sourcing OpenVMS (which they never did). As with DEC, Sun’s potential to capture the imagination of the industry (particularly software companies and major IT buyers) through open source has long since passed as every big company now has some sort of open source strategy.

The opportunity was when Sun led the industry. I remember back around 1996, I asked one of the IT guys at UCI whether he’d recommend FreeBSD or Linux. Ben said that FreeBSD had better technology, even if Linux got better press. While FreeBSD was good, Solaris was the industrial strength BSD variant that Unix sysadmins preferred. Even through 2000, Solaris was known to be superior to Linux by key IT buyers, so there was still a window to prmote an open source Intel Solaris using a paid support model, ala Red Hat.

Instead, Sun — like other established firms with established software revenues — worried about cannibalization more than growth of adoption, and watched open source rivals grow their share while Sun’s paid products occupied an every smaller niche. Sun worried too much and too long, given (as the Merc notes) it makes two-thirds of its revenues from hardware — and that it also makes significant revenues from services. As IBM has shown, both hardware and services revenues are helped by giving away software, and are helped even more by establishing your software as an industry standard through open source adoption

Is the headline right about Sun’s current strategy being ‘risky’? Sure it is, but not doing anything is certainly riskier. Sun once led the Unix and network computing industries, and has been unable to adjust to its post-bubble drift towards irrelevance. If it doesn’t do something to grab mindshare and marketshare, it will be like Cray and SGI and Data General (and eventually DEC), occupying a ever-smaller niche.


I still think Jonathan Schwartz has a plausible strategy. The problem is, the strategy isn’t working. After running up to $25 last fall, the stock is now near $13 — below where it was three years ago. Its shares fell 23% earlier this month the day after it announced an unexpected loss — missing expectations by 22¢/share.

A mighty Fortress...

At JavaOne last week, Sun updated the world on Fortress, its Java-based programming language for massively parallel processing. It’s consistent with Sun’s view of being an innovator, rather than a low cost commodity supplier.

The program from Sun’s Programming Language Research Group was originally developed using DARPA HPCS (nee High Performance Computing) money, and then with its own dollars.

For most of the past decade, Sun missed numerous opportunities by trying to control Solaris and Java rather than win adoption through open source. Given Sun’s origins as an “open systems” supplier, its failure to embrace openness was perplexing, in the face Linux at one extreme and Microsoft at the other. However, this time the prototype Fortress interpreter is already released under a combination of BSD and GPL licenses.

About 20 years ago, I was a programming language geek, working on compilers and programming language design, including some ideas about language design for one of the earliest massively parallel computer systems, the JPL hypercube.

At the time, the most radical programming language effort was Occam, intended for the Transputer processors. It was interesting to note that Sun Fellow Guy Steele acknowledges Occam in an interview about the Fortress efforts.

Having the smartest people in the field in house (like Steele, co-inventor of MIT’s Scheme language) is the path to differentiation through innovation, and having your own people implement the language is the surest path to make sure it works well on Sun hardware and software.

The problem is adoption. Historically, network effects have been the death of specialized languages (coming from the inventor of a specialized language). People would rather work with libraries wrapped around standard languages (like Fortran, C, C++ or Java) than learn a new language. So major breakthroughs like APL, Simula, Simscript, Smalltalk, Scheme and Occam were used to teach programming, but were rarely used to solve real program.

So the challenge will be to make Fortress the standard language for massively parallel systems — first at DoD and DoE research labs (like LLNL and Oak Ridge), then for government studies and analysis, and finally for computing-intensive industry problems like biotech and oil exploration).

To become the standard, Sun needs the cooperation of both the user and vendors of massively parallel computers. It doesn’t have any computers on the Top 10 (of the Top 500) supercomputers, which is dominated by IBM with other systems from Cray, HP and SGI. (Sun only has one machine in the top 50). So, as with any other standards-based competition in the industry, good technology is only valuable if it leads to adoption, tipping and network effects — and much of the adoption is driven by politics and alliances rather than the quality of the technology.

MySQL's exit strategy

We interrupt this Mac channel for an unrelated announcement.

This morning, Sun announced that it was buying open source software company MySQL for $1 billion: $800 million in cash and “assume $200 million in options”. Sun spent more than a third of its cash on the deal.

Even though MySQL is the open source company that owns the most visible and widely distributed commercial open source product, it’s still an eye-popping figure. (Red Hat Linux is another animal since it doesn’t really own most of its code). Not surprisingly, other OSS companies planning their own exit strategies were ecstatic. I imagine the VCs were too, as was the indefatigable CEO Marten Mickos.

MySQL is privately held and thus its revenues are not known. I would be shocked if it had net income beyond $50 million, and thus the acquisition could not be justified on a cash flow basis. Instead, it must be based on the promised “synergy”. Sun is gaining entry into the enterprise database market with a highly disruptive technology, but the pricing power for commodity OSS packages still seems to be in question.

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, the 800 lb gorilla of databases, Oracle, announced a $8.5 billion buyout of BEA. The two parties agreed to split the difference on their valuation from October when BEA rejected a lower offer.

Consolidation and commoditization have become the norm for the software industry. I suppose it’s better to be pushing the trend rather than fleeing from it.

Still, if the adoption and growth of MySQL doesn’t allow it to IPO, what open source company can? Or, for that matter, what software company can? It’s clear that the IPOs of Red Hat and VA Linux belong to a very different era.

Enemy of my enemy 3

IBM and Sun haven’t gotten along much in the past decade. After all, Sun’s cofounder (and longtime CEO) Scott McNeily fancied himself the leader of the anti-Microsoft coalition, whereas IBM created Eclipse (get it) to wrest control of Java development away from Sun. (A mission that largely succeeded).

But then Sun has a new CEO, and as Jonathan Schwartz himself crowed last month, on Aug. 16 IBM committed to selling Sun’s Solaris OS to run on IBM hardware. (IBM also announced a less ambitious SOlaris reselling plan two years ago).

Now IBM is supporting another Sun anti-Microsoft effort. After backing the “Open Document Format” of Sun’s OpenOffice (and StarOffice), today IBM joined OpenOffice.org and committed programmers to develop OpenOffice.

Sun, Google, now IBM. Why do I feel that if Microsoft were gone, these three would be at each others’ throats? It reminds me of my high school days, when I got a chance to experience the backstabbing possibilities of European power politics prior to the Great War.

Technorati Tags: Google, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems

Enemy of my enemy 2

In the vein of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Google and Sun have declared war on Microsoft Office.

Unless you’re an open source hacker, you probably don’t know that Sun has actually been fighting MS-Office for the past 8 years through sales of its StarOffice suite. Most of the StarOffice package is available free as an open source project via OpenOffice. Meanwhile, Google has been providing clunky web-based applications with its Google Docs & Spreadsheets website.

Now StarOffice is being distributed by Google, in hopes of getting firms to pay for a bundle of Google Apps, marking the culmination of a two-year collaboration.

Other than that Sun no longer hopes to get $70 for the paid StarOffice that competes with its free OpenOffice, I don’t know what to make of the bundle. StarOffice provides absolutely essential technology for competing with Microsoft’s stranglehold of offices and the desktop, but no one but the most fanatical OSS (or more likely, free software) adherent would say that OpenOffice/StarOffice is easier to use or has more features that Microsoft Office, although it does run better on Linux and has more open file formats. And my initial reaction to Google docs was “why”?

So other than a common dislike of Microsoft (with ex-Sun COO Eric Schmidt calling the shots) what is the point of the announcement?

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, open standards, Sun Microsystems

What is Sun thinking?

Last week was Sun’s annual JavaOne and thus its major announcements. This year, the big news was the new “JavaFX” brand, and the two products — “JavaFX Mobile” and “JavaFX Script.” Maybe I’m dense, or rushed, but I don’t get the logic of either one — the branding, the need for the technology, or how it fits with existing ecosystems.

JavaFX Script

Let’s start with JavaFX Script. Technically, it’s a statically-typed language with declarative features intended to tie together Java (particularly Swing) GUI code. Its emphasis on “rich” applications overlaps (if not compete with) the JavaScript-based Ajax, Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s new Silverlight.

Declarative languages are the best way to specify user interface/code interactions, as Mac GUI authors have known for more than 20 years. However, despite Sun’s claim to a technical need for yet another scripting language, the aims of JavaFX Script (or whatever they end up calling it) seem more about keeping Java programmers writing in Java, and developing for a Sun-controlled architecture.
Meanwhile, the latest language option raises questions about last fall’s decision to hire the “JRuby Guys” and efforts to drive Ruby development to the Java-native interpreter.

The open source and branding strategy are similarly confusing:

What Is Project OpenJFX
Project OpenJFX is a project of the OpenJFX community for sharing early versions of the JavaFX Script language and for collaborating on its development. In the future, the JavaFX Script code will be open sourced. The governance, licensing, and community models will be worked out as the project evolves.

What Is JavaFX
JavaFX is a new family of Sun products based on Java technology and targeted at the high impact, rich content market. …

Why is the JavaFX Script name so long?
Although the official name of the scripting language is JavaFX Script, we expect many programmers to just call it JavaFX as it is the core of the JavaFX family.

Everybody got that? JavaFX Script is going to be open source someday, you should just call it “JavaFX”, and this “JavaFX” has the same name as Sun’s new family of products (of which these are but the first two). If this is the long-term strategy, it’s hard to see that JavaFX Script ever becomes independent (like Eclipse) rather than captive or even dual license (like MySQL).

JavaFX Mobile

The other half of the JavaOne announcement was JavaFX Mobile.
This is based on the work of SaveJe, a spinoff of Lucent that won $71m in VC funding, and strategic support from European carriers Orange and Vodafone. Although people like the SavaJe technology — adding mobile phone features into the Java virtual machine — it ran out of money last fall and then all its IP was acquired for a song by Sun last month.

Again, Sun seems to be trying to compete head-on with Adobe (née Macromedia née FutureWave) Flash, which has successfully turned middleware into an API platform that pre-empts operating systems.

Various accounts say that JavaFX is targeted at low-end phones or "multimedia phones". (If they are the same then all phones are multimedia phones). So Sun has another six months to figure out a strategy before it ships first product. Meanwhile, it hopes to commoditize phone operating systems, pleasing carriers like Orange and Vodafone while pissing off major mobile phone customers like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola.

What does it all mean?

That Adobe, Microsoft and various second tier vendors (like Sun) want to own rich Internet content is not all that surprising. But what is interesting all these vendors are vying to offer complete solutions for mobile phones, which already has Symbian, Palm, emerging Linux solutions as well as the phone makers’ in-house solutions.

Two things seem like larger lessons:

1. Unlike with the original Acrobat, or Flash, none of the competitors are willing to let a new platform win by default. (Even MS-DOS had competition briefly from CP-M/86 and of course recently from Linux).
2. So far, all of these options (except Linux) seem to be proprietary software stacks with only an occasional bone of openness (such as the JavaFX and Silverlight open source promises). Either the vendors are right, and buyers (whether end users or hardware makers) don’t care about openness, or there’s an opportunity for someone to compete using openness as a weapon.

Technorati Tags: Java, Sun Microsystems

Sun’s Rebound Continues

Back in 2001-2002 when I was researching my second open source article — eventually published in 2003 in Research Policy — I ended up studying three companies: Apple, IBM and Sun. I guess the editors of the special issue liked it because it was one of the first academic articles to treat open source as a corporate strategy rather than merely a way of collaborating to produce technology.

The Apple and IBM strategies were relatively straightforward. Not surprisingly, Apple was selectively open — what I called back then “opening parts.” And, as will be familiar to anyone today, IBM is cross-subsidizing “free” (whatever that means) software with expensive hardware and services.

I never quite got Sun. On the one hand, they had claimed to be about “open standards” for decades, and had promulgated a few pieces of code (like NFS) for the rest of the world to enjoy. On the other hand, they had been at the center of the Unix wars and (like all the other Unix vendors) wanted a few little switching costs to make it more likely enterprise customers would stay with them. So when it came to open source, Sun’s strategy 5 years ago had an element of ambivalence to it. Meanwhile, in the post-bubble era IT managers who preferred Sun’s elegant systems went out and bought Lintel boxes because they were good enough.

Under Jonathan Schwartz, the company has been more aggressively open in its IT strategies — which is risky, but it was clear the old cautious approach to wrenching industry change was on a terminal glide slope. They started the process of open sourcing Solaris in 2004 — nearly 5 years later than when it would have really mattered, but still a positive step to deal with the flood of industry change.

Today, Ian Murdock joined Sun Microsystems to, as he says, both help it respond to Linux and also to work more closely with it. He is the “ian” in Debian, former CTO of the Linux Foundation (née Free Standards Group) and apparently a longtime Unix fanatic and Sun fan. While it’s initially impossible to distinguish a symbolic hire from a substantive one, Sun’s ability to attract Murdock and its (presumed) willingness to listen to his ideas is a positive sign for a company that several years many gave up for dead. Perhaps they’ll enjoy an Apple-like revival.

Technorati Tags: Linux, open source, open standards, Sun Microsystems