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.

i have a better question

[Anonymous Coward]

If judge Kimball rules that SCO had no rights to sell sun a license to open source solaris, will Sun go to bat for the Open solaris community or leave them hang under a legal cloud?

Open Solaris may soon be legally encumbered once again, because Sun and Schwartz failed to do due diligence in finding out who really owns unix.

Re:Sun...

[Facetious]

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 would love Solaris like you love Linux. Why can't you love us?"

Re:i have a better question

[njcoder]

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.

So here's a question for the FOSS world

[weston]

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.

Re:i have a better question

[argent]

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 the money in his pocket, that doesn't necessarily mean you get to keep the cash register.

Was "the right to sell transferrable source licenses" one of the things that SCO had the right to sell to Sun?

Well, if SCO has to pay Novell 2 million, then I guess Novell has accepted the money for the cash register. If SCO has to give it back to Sun, then Novell gets to go after Sun. If SCO gets to hang onto it, who knows?