Simon Phipps wrote:
It's been an interesting "does he take sugar" experience watching the conversation about me; I thought I'd interject with a link to a story that has correct information:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/former-sun-open-source-officer-joins-osi-board-109
Ths thing I find interesting in the article, and indeed in many of your
statements, is that you show absolutely no sign of self-doubt about
whether open sourcing everything you could actually destroyed
shareholder value and drove Sun down the toilet. I'm certain that there
was a decision to be made about being mean and nasty to the open source
systems that were eating your lunch (and dinner) or whether to cosy up.
But I'm not sure you made the right one, because Solaris did run on
Intel and Java was a powerful card, and the companies that are still
standing are ones who didn't give away all their IP and show their
competitors their cards. You might have done the right thing for society
as a whole (maybe: we'll see how your big customers fare and whether
ultimately there's a reduction in real choice) but I'm not at all sure
you did the right thing for Sun shareholders. I'm not one, but I've been
a fairly happy user at major banks. (I was a less happy personal
customer - I paid as much for your C++ compiler on Solaris 2.5 as I did
for MSDN Universal - and guess which got me support and updates for a
year? And which was the better compiler?)
Personally I don't give a fig whether Solaris is free (in either sense)
- so long as it has a version that's affordable, preferably in the
ballpark of Windows or MacOS. After all, Esix and Interactive are long
gone. It remains to be seen whether that happens. I'd be quite happy for
Oracle to dismantle the freedom in exchange for a hundred dollar UNIX
with a stable ABI and an NDA-happy relationship between the driver
integrators and nVidia and ATI that can deliver Mac-like stability and
video integration and performance on vanilla hardware, but I suspect
I'll be disappointed since Oracle have hardly courted that sort of
market. Maybe I'll just have to get a Mac - I've been resisting. :-(
Let's remember: Sun opened a lot of technologies - but I rather think it
was done without seeing how to monetise it. And you can't put the genie
back in the box. Sun is now history. Maybe it would have been anyway,
its speculation, but the management at Sun failed, badly.
James
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