In an exclusive conversation with eWEEK’s Steve Gillmor, Sun president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz discusses Sun’s nuanced position on open source and the Java community. Update: Elsewhere, Scott McNealy, the Sun chief executive who has become something of a punching bag as his company fights back to profitability, threw some punches of his own on Tuesday.
Sun’s Schwartz: Java Needs Perspectives to Grow
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Eugenia Loli
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“There’s a lot of FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] about what exactly is open source. Does it in fact cure cancer?”
where did this guy pull that from?. there is obsolutely no FUD over whether or not open source cures cancer. It doesnt
All the guy answers is redhat is this and redhat is that. Ask about java, solaris or his dog and the answer is redhat is evil
The weirdest part in the interview came on p. 7, where Gilmoor asked Schwartz about BEA and IBM’s client-side persistence technologies. Schwartz basically said “Good f’ing luck!” and said the market was saturated. When Gilmoor asked about alternatives, Schwatz suggested: “The .Net framework.”
Now I’ll admit I’m not the most adept at parsing the weird comments that come out of Sun execs’ mouths, but it sounds as if he’s saying he’d just as well see .Net succeed as non-JCP-blessed Java.
That’s messed up.
As a professional J2EE developer, this does not give me confidence in Sun’s management of my platform.
“As a professional J2EE developer, this does not give me confidence in Sun’s management of my platform.”
you hit the problem precisely. These guys seem pretty inconsistent to me
Again, Sun Micro is simply trying to make news about pretty much nothing. They say one thing and then they say another. What’s new here?! Again, it seems that these guys get paid by the amount of saliva expenditure calculated on a compound-basis.
I personally don’t recommend to any of my customers to buy Sun equipment because of this same reason. You simply don’t know what these dudes will do tomorrow. They might change their minds AGAIN, and this time they’ll start selling lemonade for all I know.
Sun. Great technology. Terrible business execution at all levels!
Its all about pushing the stock up. And with Open Source being such the hot topic buzzword for tech investment consultants, anything Sun can do to raise its near-zero stock up is worth a shot.
I’ve been using Sun equipment since the beginning. I even have SPARCstations at home. There’s quite a bit of talent in the company, and I respect what they have achieved in the past, and may yet achieve in the future.
But every time Jonathan Schwartz opens his mouth, I swear I’ll never do business with Sun again. He can’t say a word without twisting it until it’s upside down and backwards.
I avoid Java because people like Schwartz have convinced me that Sun will always control Java, and I refuse to become dependent on Sun or any other single company.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
In other news, regarding GCJ/Classpath’s progress with Swing, I just saw this posting to the ML today: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2004-06/msg00411.html (the “java-gui-branch” gets merged with the main trunk probably once a month or so). It’s coming along *very* nicely.
The Schwartz interview was long, and I haven’t read the whole thing, but frankly I don’t see the point in listening to him anymore. We’ve now got a mostly complete Free Java implementation. Thanks anyway Sun, but we seem to be all set now.
Osnews just had a thread about Eclipse being successfully compiled with GCJ. I expect to see more and more news like that…
Seriously, this is really boring.
Tell us more about Solaris 10 and Looking Glass, or anything even vaguely related to actual products, services and strategies – But the deranged rantings of Sun executives trying to troll about <Insert any company who isn’t Sun>’s failings are getting old now.
Christ is this what they think their job is? To raise the spewing of condescending garbage to a new level?
You’re not the only one.
The weird thing is I still want Sun to change. I feel like they have much to offer the world of business even if they adopt a fully open policy to designing and mastering their technologies. But they obviously don’t want things to change and they don’t want to change with the times, unless its financially beneficial to them. Which, I guess, seems to be point most businesses are trying to remind us is their primary goal. But the rest of us are left managing on our own with their cheaply built products expecting more quality for our money, better free support for the money we’ve already paid, since this money is so God damned important all of a sudden.
But does anyone care about the technology? Anyone care about those employees who can’t find jobs? Oh, right, its all their fault for being lazy homeless jobless fools who once believed in capitalism and earning their way through life, huh?
Suggested reading: Social Psychology 101 and the Fundamental Attribution Error.
The problems we are all facing, including Sun, is not the fault of any single individual or group. Its a byproduct of our society and environment, which includes our media. When companies are held accountable to share holders and those share holders learn how to invest by reading the financial news and the financial news writes articles and rhetorically punish certain sectors of the economy or specific companies it influences the management in those companies to act the way they act, laying off thousands of skilled, hard-working loyal employees to cut costs and make their stock look more valuable in those same financial news reports that appear every quarter.
Should business be conducted this way? Or should it be more real-time and less passion-based?
And should the average citizen in any country hold any expectation for job security? Or should we agree to disagree and completely rid the working environment of rhetoric concerning loyalty and devotion of any kind since it obviously isn’t flowing in both directions..
ok, I’m hearing people yell FUD now. hahah.. this started after the SCO crap. Well, competing is not FUD.
Sun is right anyway at the crap they are saying but they really need to keep their mouths shut.
I’m no open source. closed source crazy person i just want cheap software
Look at the bullshit and the FUD that this guy packs:
“On the Solaris side, it’s somewhat different: It’s born of an increasing frustration among Red Hat customers who are upset at the realization that Red Hat has become the exclusive supplier of Linux for the enterprise. ”
Nonsense, Debian has plenty of leverage in the web serving space. Suse is certified for all of IBM’s hardware and I deploy nothng but Mandrake in the SMB sector.
“I was just with a series of Wall Street customers, all of whom were pretty crisp in their complaints: that they can’t move code from Red Hat Linux to anything else. That their support process is such that they send an e-mail to Red Hat with an issue or a bug, and the next thing they see is a Red Hat employee posting under an assumed name in a community group, exclusively quoting the support problem and asking for help.
The customer is asking, “Why am I paying Red Hat if all the Red Hat employee is going to do is post to the newsgroup? I could post to the newsgroup.”
I am sure that’s what Red Hat does. This is so silly I am not even going to address it. I am posting it here to show how low Sun has sunk. They really must be shaking in their boots. Here’s a question for you: Linux 2.6 is out and it does some wonderful things. By year’s end, it will be shipping to Datacenters. Where will Linux be in 2 years both in technical terms and in marketshare?
Sun is dead because it refuses to deal in reality and recognize that Linux is one of the most disruptive technologies to have ever come about, both for its development process and the GNU substrate that drives many of us. It isn’t financially dead yet, but the worst thing that can happen to a technology company is to lose the mindshare of your customers.
Every six months CFOs and CIO in my area get together for lunch and to discuss trends. Everyone has transitioned some of their infrastructure to Linux or is in the process of doing so, most of the time with incredible ROI.
And to conclude, let me leave you with the venerable Schwartz:
“Go to Java.com and you’ll see a massive array of everybody from the NASCAR Speedway to weather and traffic to oximetry monitoring on human beings—there’s a huge array of developers who can rely on both innovation and compatibility to run their business.
Whereas in the Linux world, it’s really up to Linus [Torvalds] to make the call on what fundamentally happens. And it’s not to say that that’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a fundamentally different model. ”
Linus has earned his spot for the tecnical decisions he makes and for being able to drive a truly open development process that welcomes everyone and anyone. Not to mention that distributiosn patch the vanilla kernels to their liking.
I won’t waste any more time writing about Sun. These idiots really are not worth it. They can continue to play the PR campaign and use open source to gain the spotlight, but when you shed light on Sun’s business practices, from its support of SCO to its becoming a bed partner to Microsoft, it is clear that you are dealing with a proprietary dinosaur that doesn’t know how to react or adapt.
Too bad, because they have some interesting pieces of technology and some smart engineers.
They are obssesed with Red Hat. Open-source Solaris to people with problems with Red Hat policies and prices? They must smoke crack
Damn et !
USE DA Schwartz !
DA Schwartz, DA Schwartz !
No ! Needs more perspectives !
what stupid comments some of those comments are.
Aren’t sun’s quarterly results going to be posted tommarow? June 30th?
Let me think here… if revenue is not up this time.. this company will actually be doomed.
Have rubbish execs does not == “crappy OS”. Solaris still does have the advantage over Linux in a few key areas (for how long no one knows).
> the mono implementation will be open-source.
Just like the GCJ.
But not in danger of Microsoft crushing it if it is demed a threat.
While I like quite a few things in the CLR/.NET, using Mono is IMO not wise for commersal products.
It’s funny you should mention that, when I read the headline, the first thing that popped into my mind was “I see Sun’s Schwartz is as big as mine!”
Regarding the article, I don’t know why Sun doesn’t put Schwartz in a soundproof cube or something. I like Java well enough, but I think Sun (and Schwartz) have done more harm to it than good.
instead of spaceballs or starwars….
Languagewars.
One more point. Sun’s economic position will NOT let it opensource java.
If you read the second link you will notice the attack on IBM for not opensourcing.
They will never open it because they have all the developers already… unless c# starts taking marketshare.
And by the way. Why isn’t there an opensource community effort to create a c/c++ interpereted language ???
Always waiting on the big companies .
I have done all of the above, and to be honest, I’d rather do Sparc/Solaris than RedHat.
Solaris is not the ideal OS, it’s /proc is primative compared to Linux, it’s obviously more expensive. However, the advantages of having the manufacturer support their own OS are obvious. I KNOW all the drivers will work. I know that the X server will have decent performance.
If Linux was mainly hosted on Sparc, it would be different. But if I’m going to use Sparc hardware, I’m going to choose the OS which is most commonly used on that hardware.
Sun is one of those companies that still struggle to market anything. Even in their hay day I thought they marketing was aweful. Much of what’s popular in the consumer world became that way thru the word of mouth from engineers here and there.
Now Sun is marketing open source. Whoopie. Not to bash Sun but this is just another headline with no push behind it.
Look, all this tempest-in-a-teapot stuff about he-said-she-said is driving me nuts
I was looking for jobs on Dice the other day and saw a place in NYC that has 13,000 Sun servers world wide. Thirteen thousand.
They also have 800 Red Hat servers.
Sorry guys, but until places like this get rid of their servers Sun is a far cry from dead.
I can’t help but wonder if some of this is leftover bad blod from Red Hat pulling support for Linux/SPARC
Red Hat is a commercial entity. They make money off of Red Hat on x86. That’s their plan. If SPARC ports don’t make money, they cut it. However, I doubt that suddenly, because of this, the SPARC platform will be forgotten.
Time to move on, and try something different. My wife runs NetBSD on our SPARCstation 10. When we get a copy of SuSE for SPARC, we’ll probably give it a go as well.
No harm done. Just a different path to take.
Long Live The Alternatives!
This is an epic thing. If Sun does what Sun usually does and makes Solaris available under the BSD style licenses this will boost all unix like OS’s. However I think they will end up using a Sun specific license (one that was developed for this specific purpose). I also think they did this because by opensourcing solaris they can start some serious cutbacks, a large amount of the OS can be handled by the community, and this might be a major cost cutting move motivated to save sun’s ass.
Solaris has probably the best security and stability out of any of the widely used *nix’s. Not to mention the superior threading of the actual OS and its core.
However the article makes mention of using something similar to java’s licensing, which is *NOT* open source in any way shape or form. This sounds like another wait-and-see thing from the leader of wait-and-see (although not leading in much else these days.)
Funny, but the Sun-Microsoft “settlement” has effectively managed to shut out McNealy of his company.
We used to get a “Microsoft is evil” speech whenever McNealy opened his mouth.
Now we get a “RedHat is evil” speech (and some more weird stuff that makes me wonder what this guy has been smoking) whenever Schwarz opens his mouth.
I guess money does wonders…
There’s one thing that he said that sounds reasonable to me.
IBM wants Java to be opensourced so that they can include their own developments on their own. That’s why they don’t like the JCP.
If java gets opensourced there may be a big fight between companies about what gets into the standard. And if Java is fragmented it doesn’t have much future.
I may be wrong but that’s just my opinion.
I agree that JS has not done Sun a good job when it comes to PR but this is one of his best pieces – this actually gave me hope that Sun is on the right path. Even though still vague on certain parts, I have gained more knowledge about Sun’s thinking here than in any article in the last 12 months.
And to the guy that complained that JS mentioned .Net and the others that concurred with him, this is the exact behaviour that gives OSS a bad name. This type of “passive” zealotry is actually more destructive than the guy who shouts from the rooftop “OSS is a god-send that can do no wrong”.
What do I mean?
[Overly-simplified-analogy]
You have a company named 3 that makes a product named 3 and follows the 3 philosophy. Your competitor is 2 and makes a product named 2…
During an interview you are asked what is 1+1? Now following the logic of the guys that have posted to this forum criticising the mentionaing of .Net the answer here is 3 because we dont want to sell out our company/philosophy. The only alternative is to claim there is no answer.
But – this is a major BBUUUTTT – the question was not what product do you make; what’s the better product; what is your philosophy, etc, etc. It was simply – what is 1+1?
[/End-of-overly-simplified-analogy]
What the interviewer asked JS was if there was any product on the market that had the functional ability of what BEA is trying to do and he gave an honest answer, there is only one, .Net. Not even Sun or IBM which once again show the genius and creativity of the guys at BEA, “magic” as JS puts it.
In closing I would say to OSS supportors and advocates (of which I am a part), lying to further OSS will not do us any good. If you are in a position where you think you are furthering MS agenda/success and you do not want to – just excuse yourself rather than stand there and claim “1+1=3”.
However, just like a baby, an alert customer will pick up on this and do not be surprised if they do not call you again. Rather, make sure you know your stuff (LAMP/Java/Linux/GPL, etc.) really well and offer then some options.
Give your customer more than they are seeking/expecting of you and I tell you, you will have done OSS greater good than damage inflicted by a 100 lies.
Why isn’t there an opensource community effort to create a c/c++ interpereted language ???
Did the Parrot not tell you about Perl 6? Talk to the Parrot!