INTERVIEW
In your estimation, is the the day, that’s what CIOs So now we’re in the the masses that ensures
open-source message getting care about. They just want midst of negotiating a the most capable, the
out to the institutions, by to run their businesses license, and they’ll wind most useful and the most
and large? better, and they don’t want up saving, like everybody secure platforms, because
Schwartz: They may not to get involved in political else, $5 million or $10 mil- it undergoes the scrutiny
be the target demographic. philosophy or theorizing. lion. And that, in a slowing of the largest collection of
Because, for 95 percent economy, is a very helpful eyeballs in the world.
of the CIOs I interact How is a slowing economy thing.
with, when you say “open affecting the company? What is Sun’s strategy to
source,” they cringe. And Schwartz: A slowing econ- Are the old-school, institu- sell the development of cloud
they worry. And what they omy is great for free soft- tional enterprise companies computing?
want to know is: Is there ware. It’s fabulous. Look, generally beginning to see Green: Sun is in a unique
robust enterprise support, if your No. 1 driver of cost the value of open-source soft- position as a neutral party
a high-integrity road map, in your data center is pro- ware? to provide a great cloud
great innovation and full prietary software, the fact Green: It varies, but it computing platform for
legal indemnification? So that you pick up MySQL always has the same end- developers. Our view is
that’s what we talk about simply by picking it up ing. It’s very funny. Last that we have a series of
when we talk to CIOs. and putting the MySQL year we had a Sun Tech open-source technolo-
And again, none of them coffee mug on your desk, Day in St. Petersburg [Rus- gies, in Net Beans and
is likely to join the com- you could save $15 mil- sia]. We had the event in others, that have already
munity and submit a bug lion or $25 million. That’s
fix. That’s the antithesis of what we’re seeing across
what they want to do. On the world. ‘Wherever you go, it’s [open
the other hand, if you talk I was with the CIO of a source] in wide use. ... This
to a developer, or a startup, very traditional financial
or a developing nation, they institution recently. At is a bottoms-up trend that is
care an awful lot about the the end of our meeting, unstoppable.’
fact that we have the highest- I said, “By the way, we’ve
integrity open source license, just announced the clos-highest-integrityopensource ing of our acquisition of a hockey stadium, the been extended to provide
community—the only real MySQL.” The CIO looked biggest place we could cloud computing inter-productive commercial at me and she said, “Well, find. So I asked the audi- faces. There are already
engagement with open that’s nice, but we really ence, “How many of you extensions in NetBeans
sourceinthemarketplace. don’t use MySQL here. are using MySQL open that allow you to direct
Lots of other companies We’re a proprietary soft- source?” About three- your development efforts
have assembled intellec- ware shop.” A very eager quarters, or 90 percent, of to deploy on the network,
tual property and then Sun sales rep was with me the people’s hands went dot-com cloud.
put their brand on the who had checked in with up. Remarkable! This is What we did a few years
top and said, “Look what his buddy at MySQL and pretty far away, and it was ago is that we took Net-we did.” We actually put found out that this orga- a classic case of the overall Beans and we said, “This is
11,000 engineers to work nization had downloaded adoption of open-source a great developer environ-at Sun to go fuel those MySQL 1,300 times in the technology. ment; let’s don’t limit it to
communities, seed those last six months. Wherever you go, it’s Java.” Since then, Ruby,
communities and drive [The CIO] was stunned [open source] in wide use. JRuby and now JavaScript
those communities. The by that. A couple of their Like the years-ago growth 6.1 are radically amplify-net result is we produce technology folks who were of Linux or Windows, this ing the number of users
innovation—with brands also there said, “Actually, is a bottoms-up trend that we have. Then to be able
like MySQL, OpenSolaris it’s the No. 1 database all is unstoppable. to say to them “deploy to
and Java—and then we of us use. It’s just that we This [open source] is Network Dot-Com using
produce products and don’t have a commercial about unfettered access that same tool base” is a
technologies that allow licensebecause we’vebeen to technologies, the con- value point that Google
businesses to run more told we’re a proprietary tributions of communi- or Amazon simply don’t
efficiently. At the end of vendor shop.“ ties and development by [CON TINUED ON PAGE 56]
