Simon Phipps - Sun's saving grace?
Simon Phipps is Sun's Open Source guru, he's also their saving grace. I'll explain why: Sun is a company stuck in it's traditional UNIX background, it's developed great technologies like NFS and Java, but it's not really known what position to take since GNU-Linux came on the scene. Sun execs didn't fully "get" what was happening in the market after the monumental shift back towards open/free development approaches. Sun obviously didn't read The Cathedral and the Bazaar back in 1999 when the FSF and Netscape etc were radically overhauling their development models. Perhaps someone bought Jonathan Schwartz a copy of Producing Open Source Software? Who knows.. but finally in 2006 Simon has convinced the execs that if you can't beat 'em, you should join 'em. So Sun are now embarking on an open Java platform strategy, and I wish them well. They won't end up bankrupt like SGI, at least for the moment ;) Too little too late? We'll see.
Labels: GNU-Linux
posted by Jon Grant, UK, 東京 @ 01:55
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Thanks for the kind words, Jon, but it's way more complex than that. Remember that in 1999 Sun was one of the companies that actually supported Mozilla, both with developers and cash, and that Sun has been a deep supporter of Mozilla, X, GNOME, Perl and much, much more for ages. For example, Sun started OpenOffice.org in 2000. Sun has long been the largest contributor to open source. So simple analysis suggesting Sun hated and now loves open source needs rework.
The real change is in the recognition that a networked age prefers paying for usage than for licenses - something I know not to be as widely recognised as many believe. That means support for FOSS switches from either charity (the Gartner view) or back-room (Sun's old view) to front-line (Sun's new view). I'm excited to have the job of shepherding Sun through this transition.
Sorry, where I work we're thrilled with Sun's focus on innovation, in Solaris, Java and their core systems platforms. While IBM has been prattling on about Linux - without any product or offering beyond a Red Hat license. Just like HP - all press releases, no innovation.
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