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Those who hope Sun Microsystems Inc. will open-source all of its software products anytime soon are in for a big disappointment.
Sun executives, including president Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono, the executive vice president for software, have all repeatedly said that the Santa Clara, Calif., company intends to open-source its entire software stack over time.
However, they have not been specific about the time frame for that, which has left the impression that it is imminent.
But Simon Phipps, Suns chief open-source officer, told eWEEK in an interview that this process is not going to be rushed and will not happen quickly.
“I am not going to allow us to do it too fast. We are not going to rush any of these things. This is not a token gesture. This is not the alphaWorks of 1999 where you throw it out and see if it sticks,” Phipps said.
“I have a DNA triangle for open source that I use to describe to people. I say that an open-source community is defined by the license it adopts; by the governance that administers it; and by the diversity of the community that populates it,” he said.
Citing a recent example where a member of a Sun product team had come up to him and asked to open-source the product, Phipps said: “So I asked him what license they wanted to use, and he did not know. I asked how they would create an open community and what the governance model would be, and they had not thought of this. Then I asked them how they would make money, what the business plan was. Again, they hadnt thought about it,” he said.
Those are the same questions he will ask any product team at Sun looking to open-source, Phipps said.
“This is genuinely about building open communities with open governance and open licensing, and it is going to take as long as it takes,” he said.
But Sun has already moved fairly quickly along the road of either open-sourcing its software stack or making it available at no cost.
Last month, it said it would make its Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 management software, and Sun developer tools available for development and deployment at no cost, while reaffirming its commitment to open-sourcing all this software over time.
Also last month, Sun officials said they would distribute and support the open-source Postgres database with the Solaris operating system, adding that Solaris ZFS, the new 128-bit file system with error detection and correction capabilities, would be integrated into OpenSolaris and Suns branded Solaris 10 in the May 2006 update.
They also announced Sun Studio 11 and said the company will offer the development tool set free of charge to all developers.
In June, Sun released components of its Java Enterprise System technology stack to the open-source community under the CDDL (Community Development and Distribution License).
It released the Sun Enterprise Service Bus implementations, based on the communitys Java Business Integration specification, and its Java Systems Application Server.
And, in the biggest open-source move the company has made so far, in June it released the long-awaited millions of lines of source code for OpenSolaris, the open-source version of its Solaris operating system, a move designed to expand the developer base for, and applications written to, that platform.
Asked what Suns business model is around open source and whether this is a services play, Phipps said that one of his favorite throw-away lines is that “paying for binaries is so last millennium.”
“When people pay for software these days, they are not paying for binaries but rather a value proposition that has several layers. Customers are buying a value proposition that contains the same elements as it always has: code, defect resolution and a warranty and indemnity,” he said.
“Our customers are now mature enough to know that they are not buying a binary, and we know that they are willing to buy a subset of that value proposition and that they are willing to pay us for it,” he said.
The question Sun has asked itself is whom it was preventing from becoming its customers by still charging for the binary.
By deciding not to charge for that, it is now in a position to start serving those who would never have been a customer before, Phipps said.
Those potential customers spanned all industries, but were typically “people at a turning point, whether they have been using competitive product and are at a turning point and, as there is no license cost for the competitive product from Sun, it is now possible to do the pilot,” he said.