Jonathan Schwartz said something very interesting on his blog today. (I wish he blogged more, and with fewer happy Sun employee faces in his blogs, but this one was good.) He was talking about Sun's licensing of its Neptune ASIC to Marvell, and made this comment:For years we were called proprietary - a moniker that did more damage to Sun than any market downturn. And frankly, we've spent years recovering. But at Jonathan Schwartz said something very interesting on his blog today. (I wish he blogged more, and with fewer happy Sun employee faces in his blogs, but this one was good.) He was talking about Sun’s licensing of its Neptune ASIC to Marvell, and made this comment:For years we were called proprietary – a moniker that did more damage to Sun than any market downturn. And frankly, we’ve spent years recovering. But at this point, my hope is we’ve completely turned that slur on its head, that we’ve come to define open – more open than any other vendor, more open than open itself. From silicon to systems, software to storage and services.I get a lot of grief for being an open source bigot. Few that make that claim seem to understand that I spent my years in the “hybrid” wilderness. It didn’t work. That’s why I’ve increasingly opted for a pureplay open source view. Because it works. It has worked for Sun, too. Take a look at the company’s two-year stock price: I’m not saying that other software development and distribution methodologies don’t work. I’m not an idiot. (OK, so I might be an idiot, but I’m not an idiot all the time. Can we agree on that? Please?? 🙂 ) I can see how well Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc. are doing. What I am saying is that I think pureplay open source is a better way. That is my bias. If you’re looking for the view that the GPL/proprietary licensing/BSD are all equally valid in their own ways, you won’t find that view here. I don’t believe it. To get balance, you’ll need to read people who believe differently than I do. It’s not my job to espouse everyone else’s viewpoints. It’s my job to sell my own. My company, Alfresco, is on track to quadruple sales selling 100% free software. Wonder why I like the model so much? Sun has discovered the exact same thing. Freedom sells. Or, rather, services around freedom sell. The freedom itself is, well, free. Take this blog for what it is: one man’s opinion. The only way to judge its validity is how the principles play out in the real world (Jamesian pragmatism). They’re doing very well for Alfresco, Red Hat, Sun, MySQL, JBoss (now Red Hat), and others. It’s an open question whether this will continue.But then, it’s also an open question whether proprietary vendors will continue with their success. We seem to take the world as it is as a template for how it should be. But if we do that, then we need to recognize that the software industry is anomalous – commodification is the norm, not creating millions of copies of the same thing with no, or little, marginal cost. I think there’s a better way. Better for customers and, ultimately, for vendors. Let’s agree to disagree along the way. Just don’t be surprised that I’m trying to win over your customers to my way of thinking. You’re doing the same. You’re just not succeeding as much as you used to. 🙂 Open Source