Interview With Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz

Engadget recently grabbed a few minutes with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. They were able to get some great information on the JavaFX Mobile platform as well as Java on the iPhone and how the struggle against Microsoft is going with respect to open source.

Typical Schwartz

First of all, this was on Engadget Mobile, so it's strictly limited to porting Java to portable devices.

That said, here's a typical question:

"Jonathan, we have videotape of you mooning the CEO of Apple and saying "Not until after hell freezes over you SOB." This seems to indicate some difficulties in getting Java on the iPhone."
"Absolutely not! There aren't any technical challenges to porting Java. We can completely get it done man, just as long as Apple doesn't screw around again. There are no technical problems. Technical issues aren't there. Nope. No way."

The sooner someone smashes that pony-tailed freak in, the better.

Re:

You must be new here.

This is Slashdot, not Mensa. BIG difference!

jPhone

"the Sun software apparently looked eerily like the Apple iPhone's software; in fact, the platform Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed off is already being dubbed "jPhone" based on the striking resemblance to Apple's goods.... Scott McNealy alluded to the copying of Apple's modus operandi by wearing a black t-shirt..."

It doesn't surprise me when I see Apple-Sun coherence or imitation. Schwartz's roots are in NeXTStep/Cocoa development. I'm actually surprised there isn't more with Schwartz at the helm.

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Good point! I don't actually know, but I guess it has to do with Sun's focus on servers lately, and the fact that the customers of their workstations used to be scientific people not very concerned with desktop elegance.

Sun...

I don't know what it is, but Sun seem to want to be Apple for some strange reason.

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Sun's identity crisis is not new. "We're a hardware company! No, Software! Software! We're pro-open source. Except when we buy an open source company like MySQL, then we like to close things off. We also love Linux! No, Solaris! We wish you all wou

Re:Sun...

Yes, hard to believe that a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees would choose to focus on more than just one product. I guess companies like HP, Apple and IBM must have this same identity crisis?

I can just picture you running into your local Staples and yelling "Make up your mind! Are you a pen store or a staples store?"

As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. The things that were available under the GPL licenses will always be available. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them.

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As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them.

I've heard that response many times and I don't understand why people like you think it means anything. When a company is acquired, there are changes. Often huge changes. Changes to bring the company into line with the goals of the parent company.

Schwa

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MySQL had a sketchy open source relationship long before Sun were in talks to acquire them. The comments that Sun is close sourcing MySQL is disingenuous. Nothing is being "closed", just that some new features may not be released in the community edition.

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Looks fairly clear to me that Sun will Open Source all of MySQL......

http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/jonathan_on_closed_mysql_extensions [sun.com]

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I guess companies like HP, Apple and IBM must have this same identity crisis?

Actually, I think there IS something of a corporate schizophrenia. It's the effect of size and complexity. My point is that Sun has had a harder time defining its corporate vis

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Nah, it goes deeper than that. Dealing with Sun as a target platform is frustrating as can be. Are they investing money on SPARC or is it dead?

Nothing from Sun has indicated they are giving up on SPARC. New versions have been coming out with their T1, T2 and Rock is coming next year. From what I understand Sun still makes more money from selling SPARC based machines than they do from their Int

Can Java help Sun's bottom line?

2500 people laid off and dismal stock price. Off 3% just today.

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Well, the pessimistic view might be that it already has...

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Two and a half thousand people out of work, and your post is emphasising the stock drop? Way to give a shit about your fellow man, dude.

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Two and a half thousand people out of work, and your post is emphasising the stock drop? Way to give a shit about your fellow man, dude.

Thousands of people died in Africa today, while your dumb ass is typing it up on Slashdot. Belittling others is your contribution to man kind? Insightful my ass. Go utilize a Kleenex, jerkoff.

Re:

They've not laid off 2500 people yet. Just announced plans to lay off 1500-2500. Which I suppose is more or less the same. Guess what? Google is planning layoffs as well. Special eh?

So here's a question for the FOSS world

Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?

I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.

I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.

There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.

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Huh? Judge Kimball might rule that SCO
ripped off Sun, but not that Sun didn't
buy licences from Bell back when they
together wrote Solaris 2 (Solaris 1 was
BSD, you may remember, for which you
still had to buy a Bell 32V license)

--dave

Re:i have a better question

Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix. Whether SCO had a right to sell licenses isn't the issue. SCO was supposed to sell licenses, send 100% of the license fee to Novell and Novell would send SCO back 5% which was their fee for acting as the licensing agent. The only thing Novell is saying is that SCO didn't give them the money. That's not Sun's fault.

If you go to a store and purchase something, you give the cashier the money, but the cashier puts it in their pocket instead of the register, the store owner can't come take what you purchased away from you.

From my limited understanding, I think it wasn't just SYSV licenses Sun purchased. SCO had a good product called UnixWare that had very good driver support in the x86 world. I think I remember reading somewhere that part of Sun's licensing deal with SCO was for drivers, which I would assume were for SCO's UnixWare and not just for Unix SYSV licenses. So what SCO owes Novell for what Sun paid them, may not be the entire amount.

Regardless, I highly doubt Sun wouldn't indemnify the OpenSolaris community. They indemnify customer's they sell RedHat and SuSE to. So to even think they wouldn't indemnify users of their own codebase is just ridiculous.

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Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix.

What exactly they were to be the licensing agent for is one of the things that's under question.

If you go to a store and purchase the cash register, and the cashier puts t

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But Novell already stated they won't be pursuing Unix copyrights. [pcworld.com] So OpenSolaris has nothing to fear, which is what the original poster was trying to imply.

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Someone should do something then about those billions of phones that are less powerful than an iPhone and currently run Java then.

Re:As the first SCMAD (in my country?) i just woul

Sure, they are the greastest (commercial) supporters of open source. No denying that.

There's plenty of denying that.

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There's plenty of denying that.

Sure you can deny the sky is blue if you wanted to as well. However an independent study created for the EU [businessreviewonline.com] says otherwise.

The study also backs up Sun Microsystemsâ(TM) claim to be the biggest donator of open source code. The top ten business contributors were as follows:

1 Sun Microsystems 51,372 Person-months 312m euros
2 IBM 14,865 Person-months 90m euros
3 Red Hat 9,748 Person-months 59m euros
4 Silicon Graphics 7,736 Person-months 47m euros
5 SAP 7,493 Person-months 46m euros
6 MySQL 5,747 Person-months 35m euros
7 Netscape 5,249 Person-months 32m euros
8 Ximian 4,985 Person-months 30m euros
9 Realnetworks 4,412 Person-months 27m euros
10 AT&T 4,286 Person-months 26m euros

Also from here [sun.com].

"Did you know that Sun contributes more than $200 million per year of intellectual property to the open source movement, in dozens of open source projects? The companyâ(TM)s historical contribution tops $2 billion. WOW!"

A list of some of the open source projects Sun contributes to [sun.com] can be found on that link.