Opening an odyssey of opportunities!

With the legendary success that Sun Microsystems, Inc. has achieved with its open source model, MySQL and Innotek acquisition by the company has further fueled its never-ending penchant to be the biggest open source enterprise in the world.

Hours after the acquisition formalities were finalized and MySQL was welcomed to the Sun family, Richard Green, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems, Inc. spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian from Cybermedia News on Sun’s recent acquisitions and opportunities in open source.

How does the Innotek acquisition augment the value chain of Sun’s xVM program?

Innotek is a very fast-growing company and the value chain to us is to link it to our xVM server technology, our developer technology.

It’s really the key in this end-to-end developer model and it’s really an important piece for us. We are really doing well with virtualization with open Solaris but the piece that is really missing is that—what would developers do, if you are operating on a different operating system, and how do you transfer that work into a server is a problem. This would solve the problem. So that is the value chain.

May 2006 witnessed you and Jonathan Schwartz announcing that Sun would release Java under the open source license. Looking back, do you think it was a tad late?

It is really easy to re-think history and figure out what you could have done differently or better. We are certainly happy that we have open-sourced Java, and in retrospect had we done sooner, it would have been better.

It would have been a better thing to open up Solaris quickly though it began early, it took a long time to clear out all the legal encumbrances and it was a long process.

I think that the cultural difference occurred when we opened Java was to build the biggest Open Source company in the world and in that context obviously we have open sourced Java. If you are going to become the most powerful company, the most important platform has to be the open source and that was the core process.



You released Java under GPLv2 and GPLv3. why was that so?

It’s very simple. When we released, there was no GPLv3, and we could not have released it back then. Now, there is GPLv3. with all our open source technology, we are going to look at the acceptance of GPLv3 and over time we would move into that. That is extremely likely that you would see us going into v3.

You have acquired MySQL and have completed the formalities too. How would you bring together two different cultures into one platform?



I don’t think there has been a simpler and more obvious combination than between Sun and MySQL. They (MySQL) are just like us. They are a technology and innovation company is are based on open source and GPLv2.

They are full open source model company. They are community and developer focused. Their support systems and pricing models are the same.

So, integrating the two companies was really easy. One of the things that we are very careful about is ‘do not disturb them’. They are doing so well.

Could you talk to us a wee bit on the functioning part of the whole exercise?

Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL) would report to me. Marketing and engineering would continue to report to Marten. Services and sales will indirectly report to Marten but would directly report to the sales and services organization of Sun.

Their complete teams are reporting with no changes. So, we would continue to operate as MySQL always has. We can add the reach of all our sales people.

We are going to compensate all our sales force on MySQL. We are going to train 700 worldwide services people to support MySQL. We are going to complete that in 60 days. So, it’s just an easy fit.

Sun Microsystems has been in the forefront of eco friendly initiatives for about two years now. What has been the underlying rationale behind this?

Well, it’s a broad topic. Our eco-green efficiency covers a wide variety of things whether it’s our Niagara 2 microprocessor with its throughput per watt is just unparallel in the market.

Even if you look at Solaris and Dtrace, it’s all about getting more efficiency in existing platforms. So, we have built kind of programs in which our servers and our software programs are configured to provide more eco-friendly and more efficient platforms.

So, we are a very broad eco-centric company and as part of the culture of Sun. One of the reasons we started early is that a lot of work, which we did all these years, has been about efficiency whether its past performance or voltage or software performance and this is just another step.

I mean this is just application of efficiency and good design to eco-centric goals. For us, it just seems like more of what we were doing like certain other companies which are going green. It is all about great design and we think we have been doing it well for years.

What are the chief concerns that a Java developer has from Open Source?



Well, I don’t think there are challenges so much as how quickly can we build and scale a business model. We get questions all the time. How do we make money when you are going to sell your software for free?

We are growing in software business faster than we have ever grown before. I think, it is taking more time to condition the market than our own employees about how to operate an open source business.

The questions keep coming up and we are doing really well. So, some of it is internal training on the business side and some of it is cultural one.

Engineers historically by their nature tend to work a lot and open source is about cultural interaction, community work etc. So, changing the culture at Sun having our engineers interacting with their community has been a bit of a change. I think we are well along executing those changes. Everybody is on it, am on it.

How are you working out on the encumbrances?

Well, it varies. The more matured the product or the project has been before you open source, the higher the probability that there would be encumbrances.

That’s why Solaris took long, Java is moving more quickly and there are few things left. What we also found is that the areas of code that has encumbrances.

We ask the companies for their support in freeing up those encumbrances. It’s a very successful tactic in saying that if you don’t, then we would remove it and replace it with an open source application. It can be either yours or not yours. It’s a very effective technique.