Saturday, October 02, 1999

Exchanging email with Dale this morning, I asked him to post some of his thoughts about open source and the Solaris release. He said "open Source should be a spectrum, not the extreme end of the spectrum. Community licensing fits nicely on the spectrum and shows that Sun is moving in a useful direction."

An example of how broad our discussions were, we talked about turning Scripting.Com into a joint venture between O'Reilly and UserLand. Wouldn't that be interesting! But that was just one idea.

Matt Neuburg: Exploring MainResponder. "The most important thing to grasp about MainResponder is how it decides what object to serve and how to serve it. Is it a file on disk? Is it an object in the main database? Is it an object in a guest database? If it's a script, should it be shown or run? If it's a wptext, should it be handed back as is, or should it be rendered as a web page object through the Web page rendering framework?"

Red Herring: Sun Flips to Open Source Trend. "Sun's critics suspect Sun's plans are smoke and mirrors. 'It's interesting, but it's not open source,' says Melissa London, spokeswoman for Red Hat Software, the leading Linux distributor. 'It still makes the developers beholden to Sun.'"

Wait a minute. Isn't Red Hat smoke and mirrors? Their market cap is $5.844 billion. What is their product? Hello.

Where have we seen this before? In the early days of the PC industry, Softsel controlled the flow of software. They were the gods. Didn't last long. When you sell a commodity you're very open to price competition. Distribution is a thin business model. In the shakeout that followed one of the CEOs of one of the leading distributers likened it to flying at a thousand miles an hour two feet off the ground. You feel the bumps.

Eric Raymond says no: "'Sun has tried this scam before with Java and Jini and we are not going to buy it,' said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative and one of the leaders of open source community. 'They are trying to use us as free labor, without making us a partner. Sun retains all the rights. These terms are therefore unacceptable.'"

How do Solaris users view this? I suspect Sun was not too concerned about Eric Raymond. (Thanks!) Instead it's likely that the move was a response to requests from Solaris users. As a software developer with a growing customer base I am very curious to know how Solaris users view this development.

Sun's market cap is $71.811 billion. Because there's something really there.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of DaveNet.Big wheel keeps on turning.