The Unholy Trinity: SCO, SUN, MS

Raving Luni, aka Ron of Linux-Universe has contributed this interesting analysis of the current battle raging against Open Source, and by extension, Freedom in general.

Sun is behind it too, very much. The Unholy Trinity shares one common issue: "Open Source software is eating into their profits". So they all support this action in a desperate attempt to save their business model. Here are the patients:

Sun is in serious condition, they will come too, more forcefully if they don't find a successful business arround OSS first. So they play both sides of the fence and speak out both sides of their mouth.

MS is only slightly ill on the surface. A combination of an improving investment market (allowing them to get a large chunk of revenue off of their investments from their huge amounts of capital reserves) and increased revenues from raking their customers over the coals with the Licensing 6 subscriptions, gives them the outward appearance of doing OK.

In reality MS realized they are screwed. So when they move from slightly ill to serious condition, you can expect a torrent of lies, FUD, legal challenges, and whatever else they can do to maintain their monopolies (Windows & Office). In the final analysis though, it is a rear guard action, while they too look for an alternative business model. Which I still maintain is the "DRM pay us for each access to digital content" model. The MS digital toll booth, licensed out to all the media/content providers as the convergence between TV, Music, Movies & Computing continues.

What they don't realize is people will not go for that. Not consumers and not the media companies either. They (the media companies) will use an open source business model (perhaps with actual closed source code) and cooperate amongst themselves to come up with their own standard DRM. And the MS Office document-restriction DRM will either be shunned, or the OSS community will come up with the same thing based on open, standard crypto and authentication methods instead of MS Active Directory and Passport tie-ins.

Or maybe they do realize that too, and that is why Ballmer and Gates have been selling quite a bit of their MS stock over the past months.

Microsoft's problems are nowhere near what Sun's are. Sun's entire business was built on a lie. It has taken a lot longer than I thought it would for reality to catch up with them, but here it comes.

The fundamental lie of Sun was this: they came into the business waving the flag of "open standards" when that was, for the first time, actually something people could see happening. The arrival of UNIX on multiple hardware platforms from multiple vendors was a very attractive thing to IT shops. At the time, literally every hardware vendor had their own proprietary operating system.

Once you bought into somebody's product line and invested in applications for it, you were basically married to that vendor for life.

The promise of UNIX was that you could buy hardware from whoever had the best boxes at the time, and switch to somebody else's boxes at some future date without being locked in by proprietary stuff. That was the flag Sun flew, and it is why they killed their only serious competitor when they started, which was Apollo. Apollo, following industry practice, had their own proprietary OS. Sun was "open" and "non-proprietary" (they were using Motorola 68000-series chips early on, and their OS was 4.2 BSD).

It didn't take them long to turn into Mr. Proprietary, loudly screaming at every step that each new move toward proprietary technology was even more "open" than the last. To hear them tell it, they were following industry standards, because whatever they did was supposedly the standard now. No one believed that crap, but they had decent boxes at decent prices, so they got big and fat anyway, even while turning into the very thing they entered the industry to replace: a guy with a proprietary operating system running on a proprietary instruction set.

So they have been living this lie for a long time, and getting away with it. But now it doesn't work anymore. They can't get the premium prices (the 'monopoly rent' from locked-in customers) anymore. They've had five straight quarters of declining revenues and profits. IBM and HP are cleaning their clocks, and Dell is coming in from the side. The departure of Bill Joy tells us that he doesn't think this is fun anymore, which in turn tells us that he didn't have another technical trick up his sleeve to save the day this time.

Sun is still big enough, and they have enough money, that they need not be screwed. They can turn into what IBM and HP are, and they appear to be doing that. Rumor has it that their next boxes will be based on the 64-bit AMD chip, not SPARC. I tend to believe that rumor because for the first time, they seem to be serious about Solaris-on-Intel. That's been around for years, but they never really spent any money on it. Now they are, and that probably does mean that they are moving toward Intel architecture themselves, even if the first round of chips will be AMD's.

Sun is too big to die as long as they don't totally screw up, but they aren't going to be as profitable as they were. They will no longer have their own little fiefdom of SPARC machines running Solaris that tie people to Sun and make switching to IBM or Dell a huge expense. They will finally have to live the BS they told people when they started, which is head-to-head competition over who can make boxes better-faster-cheaper.

They do know how to play that game, but they've gotten fat and lazy over the last seven or eight years, and it will be a struggle for them to return to their previous stance as a lean-and-mean company. Bill Joy may not be the only one who doesn't want to go back there.

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Starting Phase TWO!!!