McNealy to Ellison: How to duck death by open source
*********************************EXCERPT*************************************** <
Ex-Sun boss talks code, community, and underpants
Gavin Clarke in San Francisco •7th December 2010 01:30 GMT
Money from underpants
It couldn't have come at a worse time. Southeastern needed revenue model Plan B at a time when Sun's high-end Solaris server sales dried up in late 2008 as the economy went south. Everybody was suffering, but Sun hadn't recovered from the 2001 crash. Southeastern had no use for a software strategy founded on a theory and that was failing to deliver.
Today, Sun's formerly failing open source software is in Ellison's hands, and Ellison has made it pretty damn clear that open source is there to serve his goal of profit, and not some exercise in corporate self-indulgence. The marching orders are clear: Oracle, not the community, owns Sun's open source projects, therefore Oracle and not the community will run them. Sun's open-source software contains Sun IP that Oracle now owns, so Sun's IP will serve Oracle's greater business interests. Additional time and money spent by Oracle on Sun open source will deliver a return on investment to, you got it, Oracle.
Sun's business plan for open source software in the 2000s
Oracle has trademark ownership, too, so good luck building that level of brand recognition for your MySQL and OpenOffice splinter.
Oracle's strategy is alienating it from those who'd bathed in Sun's collegiate ways.
Is there, then, a teachable moment here? A moment that McNealy can impart to Ellison, given that McNealy is a career-long fan of marrying open source with commerce since he picked up BSD and ran with it in SunOS, and then teamed up with Unix's then-owner AT&T to sink SunOS into Unix System V Release 4 in 1990?
McNealy, after all, likes to boast how Sun donated an "enormous" amount of its R&D to the community, and he identifies Sun as the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix. Any lessons the old dog of open systems can teach the brash database king?
Sure, McNealy tells us: put your shareholders first.
Wait — what? That's the language of Ellison!
"We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share," McNealy said. "You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow."
"That's the message," McNealy tells us. "You gotta strike a proper balance between sharing and building the community and then monetizing the work that you do... I think we got the donate part right, I don't think we got the monetize part right.'