Is open source killing Sun?+

Okay. I am going to ask some questions that might sound like heresy to fans of open source, but desperate times call for brutal honesty. We are talking here about a company which changed its stock symbol to the name of their popular but free language, JAVA.

I have always wondered, how does a company make money by producing something that they then give away for free? Of course, they do have their hardware business, but despite that, is it any wonder that Sun is going under when they give away so much for free?

Java: free programming language
NetBeans: free IDE
Star Office: not free, but Open Office version is free
Open Solaris: free Unix OS (which also has to compete against Linux, also free)

In fact, Dave Rosenburg of cnet news recently wrote an article titled "How Linux killed SGI (and is poised to kill Sun)". Amazingly, when talking about Sun, Rosenburg doesn't even mention Java. Java is like a 500 lb gorilla in the room that nobody seems to notice. However, he does say, "There is a vast array of Sun software that costs a lot to maintain but doesn't deliver much revenue. This is arguably the area in which Sun's strategy has been so off the mark." Could this be an indirect reference to Java?

Rosenburg then sites MySQL as Sun's best software, which is humorous since they only acquired MySQL just over a year ago. He says, "With the exception of MySQL, there aren't many Sun software products that generate significant revenue." Say what? Sun's stock has been going down ever since they bought MySQL in early 2008 for $1 Billion. Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz was quoted at the time as saying, "MySQL was clearly the crown jewel of the open source marketplace. As far as we can see there are no higher value assets for us to be acquiring."

However, John C. Dvorak seems to have got it right when he wrote his opinion piece, "The Sun-MySQL deal stinks Commentary: Oracle is the only winner in this deal." John said, "... Sun cannot actually afford to spend a $1 billion on a company producing a mere $60 million in revenue and working outside its core competencies." I guess at the time Sun thought they were doing pretty good with a 4th quarter 2007 profit of $320 Million and could afford to expand, but these days they are in the red. (By the way, John also manages not to mention Java anywhere in his article.)

So, is open source killing Sun? Well, sort of. That and spending huge amounts of money on a stupid merger right before the economy tanked. On top of all this, it would seem that IBM recently offered to save them from the mess they got themselves into by purchasing them, but Sun screwed up that deal too.

Of course, IBM would love to be in control of Java and maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. In the wake of Sun falling apart, I can imagine a world where two or three different companies attempt to take over stewardship of Java, which Sun has made open source. It could be like the days when we had AT&T and BSD versions of Unix before Sun made the switch from BSD and everybody standardized on AT&T just before Linux came along to largely replace them all.

In fact, I am wondering... couldn't IBM save a lot of money by forking their own version of Java and letting Sun just die?

Meanwhile, Microsoft does have their own open source strategy, but as Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Technology Strategy put it in a 2008 interview, "Our focus is getting OSS on top of Windows... And I’m focused on (providing) interoperability between the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and Windows stacks." So, their priority is making sure that people continue using Windows even if they are also using Linux. They are not trying to make money off of open source. (Once again, no mention of Java.)

Honestly, I am not trying to bash (no pun intended) open source. I happen to be using Linux right now. Some companies like Red Hat have made good money selling support for Linux while contributing to its development. Red Hat is doing pretty well. They not only have their Linux but also have acquired JBoss, which they reportedly purchased for $350 Million. Was it really worth that much? I doubt it. However, Red Hat, as I point out, made their fortune on open source whereas Sun did not. So, maybe Red Hat knows what they are doing and won't make the same mistakes Sun has.