From the Editors: Innovation is Sun's legacy

By SD Times Editorial Board

August 15, 2009 —

Much has been written about the mishaps and missteps that led to the decline and fall of Sun Microsystems. At its height, it was a Silicon Valley powerhouse whose servers “put the dot in dot-com” nearly a decade ago. Today, the company is being acquired for a relatively paltry sum by Oracle.

It’s easy to take shots at where Sun fell short. Purchasing companies and failing to commercialize them, such as its acquisition of Cobalt Networks. Spending a fortune on an open-source software without explaining the return on investment, like its US$1 billion buy of MySQL AB in early 2008. Stumbling in attempts to take leadership in Java application servers, a market that it invented—then lost.

It’s also easy to pin the blame on Jonathan Schwartz, who took over the reins as Sun’s president in 2004, and became CEO in 2006. While SD Times has been critical of Schwartz, we also note that the company had been trending downward before his ascension—and he apparently had the company’s cofounder and chairman, Scott McNealy, backing him up.

Rather than take those shots, we’ll pause for a moment and think about the genuine innovation that characterized this truly unique company. Sun had a profound impact on Silicon Valley and the entire computer industry. Its SPARC processor came to dominate the world of RISC-based servers and led the industry toward 64-bit computing. Sun’s version of Unix, called Solaris, earned a reputation for stability and reliability, and introduced cutting-edge features like DTrace and ZFS. On the small side, the Sun SPOT wireless devices continue to fire the imagination.

The Java language, invented at Sun, and the Java Virtual Machine gave the software development world its first commercially successful managed runtime environment. “Write Once, Run Anywhere,” while never perfectly implemented by competing Java EE vendors, remains a compelling vision that isn’t equaled anywhere in the mainstream computing world. The Java Community Process brought together many of those competitors and provided a successful forum for evolving the Java platform.

Beyond Java, Sun impacted development with its purchase of NetBeans and its decision to release the platform as open source, then base its entire family of software-development tools on it, phasing out its older Forte tools. While lacking the market power of rival Eclipse, NetBeans is technologically second to nothing.

While Sun’s business mistakes caused many sighs, its spirit of creativity was the envy of the entire computer industry. As Sun’s intellectual property, as well as its assets and human capital, pass over to Oracle, we hope that the spirit of innovation will live on.

The open-source lobby
Open-source software should play a role in government. Open-source software can save taxpayers money (up to 15% of the U.S. government’s IT budget, according to one estimate). Why should governments pay contractors to duplicate work that’s already been done by open-source communities? It doesn’t make sense.

Well, yes it does, when you consider how governments procure software. Requirements are often shaped by lobbyists, which results in RFP (Request for Proposal) documents that are written to suit those lobbyists’ clients. That’s how government has worked for decades in buying everything, from applications to airplanes.

For the most part, lobbyists work for big commercial software companies and giant contractors. Thus, that’s where the taxpayer money flows. That’s often bad for stakeholders, especially when there are less-expensive solutions available.

To play successfully in government, open-source software needs more visibility and a voice in how government buys software. That means educating agencies to ensure that open-source solutions can qualify for RFP bids, and also directly lobbying for open source in competition to the commercial firms’ lobbyists.

Education about open source: That’s what the new Open Source for America organization promises. In theory, that’s a good idea. What we’re concerned about, however, is that the new coalition will merely lobby the government to buy products and services from its corporate sponsors. That would be a disservice to the open-source community and to taxpayers alike.

Related Search Term(s): open source, Sun

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In tough financial times, open source got more than a look It was a year of infrastructure, it was a year of enhanced development tools. But most of all, it was the year in which repositories grew up and mobile phones opened up.

Git changes how developers manage source code versions At this year's Git Together, developers praise the platform's convenience and its ability to make source control easier. Changes for the future will focus on making it more Web 2.0-compatible by offering more on-demand repositories on GitHub.

Sun-MySQL: So far, so good The integration of MySQL into Sun Microsystems is largely completed. Although the release of MySQL 5.1 has been delayed due to recently found bugs, MySQL officials welcome the added engineering support from Sun to make 5.1 a quality database product.

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