News
Right hand, meet left hand
Every once in a while I look up from my own Microsoft-centric world
(oh, I've tried a batch of other things, but I keep coming back
to the operating system and tools that I know best) to look around at
other parts of the development universe. Thanks to the wonder of
weblogs, a few thoughts about Sun have crossed my mind this week, and I
thought I'd pass them along.
Let's start with Jonathan Schwartz's weblog. Schwartz, of course, is
Sun's president, and in an August 1
blog entry he looks skeptically at IBM's decision to base a lot of its
work these days on Linux. "But ISV's can't build their business on a
social movement - they have to pick a base software distribution and web
service stack. And with most enterprises having picked Red Hat on IBM's
recommendation, IBM now clumsily realizes it's invited the fox into the
hen house. With Red Hat running on the majority of IBM's proprietary
hardware, Red Hat can now direct those customers to HP and Dell. Even
Sun." As far as I can dissect Schwartz's argument, it's that IBM made a
big mistake by building features on top of open source, because that
removes any possible hardware lockin, and lets customers move to less
expensive hardware that they can buy from any old vendor.
But now turn to a July 30 blog
entry from Adam Leventhal, a Sun kernel engineer who was just back from
the open source convention OSCON. Leventhal writes about something
called OpenSolaris, which is a coming open source version of Sun's own
Solaris operating system. "Yes, we really are going to open source
Solaris; no, we don't know the license yet; no, we don't know if it's
going to be GPL compatible." Leventhal and other Sun engineers have been
pretty consistently spreading this message, and they're claiming
executive support for it as well.
So, follow this argument: if Solaris is open-sourced, then Sun is
about to undermine its own hardware lockin. (Leventhal even says "My
personal favorite piece of input about OpenSolaris was someone's claim
that six months after Solaris goes open source there will be a port to
PowerBook hardware. If that's true then everyone in the Solaris kernel
group is going to have PowerBooks in 6 months plus a day.") That should
let Sun's customers move to other vendors who charge less for hardware -
which isn't going to do Sun's already-struggling business any good.
Of course, there are ways to resolve the apparent contradiction. We
may just be seeing a boardroom struggle that's gone public, thanks to
the increased corporate transparency offered by weblogs. Or perhaps
Sun's lawyers have in mind some license that will let hobbyists play
with Solaris on the platform of their choice without offering any actual
choice to Sun's customers (though historically the open source community
has not been especially pleased by similar shenanigans, as witness the
widespread sneering at Microsoft's shared source licenses). But it
certainly does sound like Sun needs to get all the key players into one
room and then figure out what the message is for them all to spread.
Otherwise, we outside hotheads will continue to engage in wild
speculation.