On Nov 20, 12:16 pm, "andrew.bruce.law" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > However, check out Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly 39 [1] to see what Sun > *do* think it is.
I haven't had time to listen to it yet, but the points I've heard in the past are why giving away open source software is good for Sun: - lower barrier to entry to the software: Most commercial software has that too in a "good enough way" - a 14/30/60 day trial version or a crippled free version. - make money of training, services, maintenance: Pretty much all commercial software has that revenue stream, too. - cross-selling of Sun hardware: Sun hardware revenues have been flat or falling for many quarters now, the only big change was the replacement of high-end SPARC servers with T1/T2 multi-core servers. Sun makes most of its money selling to medium and big enterprises. But there the operational guys define what kind of hardware and software they want, and then the procurement guys either pick a vendor after playing golf on the executive level or beating all vendors up on price. Neither the operational guys or the procurement guys could care less if developers feel all warm and fuzzy about Sun. > I honestly think things are changing in the > marketplace. Just look at the rise of cloud computing, IBM trying to > change the way it works with Jazz (which I know went down badly among > that audience but try it out and more importantly look at how they're > running the development) and MSFT slowly getting more and more OSS > friendly. Open source is changing the industry, no doubt about it. But cloud computing != open source - it's just a more user-friendly way of selling you software in general. And yes, I've looked at Jazz - looks awesome. But at least right now IBM thinks they can charge you big bucks for it; in a couple of years we'll know whether this worked out. > Sun might be ahead of the curve too much and die before > this all comes to fruition (think "the network is the computer") but > even if this happens I think history might be kinder on them than Wall > Street is now... I think the root problems with Sun is (and it pains me to say this as a software company) that they hurt their main revenues source very badly with Java. Joe can explain that much better than I do (http:// www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html), but essentially they took away the main incentive for buying Sun servers (running enterprise applications) by making enterprise applications run on Windows and Linux. They never really recovered from that. Then they waste a lot of money on buying companies and screwing up the merger (StorageTek, that app server company I can't think of right now; the jury's still out on MySQL). And until recently, some lot of their core software was so bad nobody wanted to even use it for free (app server, Netbeans - they have really improved in the last two years). Karsten --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
