SWAINE'S CAFE

Black. No Sugar. Extra Caffeine.

May 2007

Cnet recently interviewed Jonathan Schwartz about his first year on the job. He doesn't like the model of the cowboy CEO, he says, giving credit for Sun's successes to his predecessor, Sun's employees, leaders within the company -- anybody but himself. He doesn't want to be the public face of Sun, although he's happy to be the company's most outspoken communicator.

It's true that he's not a CEO from the mold of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Scott McNealy. But it seems that some of the values that he projects -- humility, cooperation, openness -- are values that Sun is increasingly embracing. Surely it's not coincidental that Sun has one of the most open CEOs in modern business and that it is finally aggressively enbracing open source.

Yes, Jonathan is less essential to Sun than Steve Jobs is to Apple -- Apple is uniquely dependent on its superstar CEO. But I think one could argue that Sun is starting to look like Jonathan Schwartz just as Apple looks like Steve Jobs.

Or have I just been reading the ponytailed CEO's blog too much?

Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:57 PM  Permalink |

When Microsoft threatened to sue the world over unspecified Microsoft proprietary code in FLOSS projects, it pretty much ceded the moral high ground to -- well, to anybody else.

OK, maybe anybody but SCO.

So it was hardly surprising when last week Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz offered some 'Free Advice for the Litigious' in his blog.

That advice included the claim that 'in excess of 25 percent of all lines of code within your average Linux distribution' was contributed by Sun. He even linked to a document to prove it.

Reading the document, however, reveals the following interesting statement:

Sun alone, in particular, is credited with 30 percent of the total code contribution in our sample, which highlights one of the flaws inherent in the technique used for identifying company code contribution, which is based on copyright credits. In the case of Sun, most of its contribution is accounted for by OpenOffice, for which Sun holds the copyright. The entire codebase of OpenOffice is not, in fact, Sun’s sole creation, but contributors -- individuals and other firms, small and big -- sign an agreement assigning Sun joint copyright of their contributions, in order to simplify licensing and liability management.

The way I read that, Jonathan is taking credit for code that Sun employees didn't write and claiming a commitment to open source software based mainly on copyrights that Sun holds.

I'm never going to understand intellectual property.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:57 PM  Permalink |

What would you say was the most significant announcement at this year's JavaOne conference? The JavaFX family of technologies got a lot of attention, but I'd guess most serious developers would cite the news regarding the open-sourcing of Java.

Early in the conference Sun announced that it had wrapped up the process of making (most of) its core Java technology available under GPLv2. The Java 2D API seems to be the main non-open source holdout. Three open-source Java communities that Sun is seeding are: OpenJDK, Mobile & Embedded, and Glassfish.

On another JavaOne note, Timothy O'Brien captured a cute quote from Jonathan Schwartz. Unless I'm misreading it, Jonathan is saying, "If we add up enough zeros, it could be HUGE!"

Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:57 PM  Permalink |

At JavaOne this week Sun revealed a new family of tools that should further expand the pool of people writing Java code... by freeing them from the need to write Java code. JavaFX targets cellphone and other device app developers now held hostage to Adobe Flash or AJAX or contemplating using Microsoft's beta'd Silverlight or Google's anticipated whatever.

These people may be swimming in the shallow end of the pool, according to Cnet. JavaFX consists of a scripting language that generates bytecode to execute in JRE, plus a kernel and libraries for mobile phones and set-top boxes and the like.

Why? Clearly to challenge AJAX and Silverlight. But apparently why's not the question.

In his CEO blog this week, Jonathan Schwartz riffs on the what-it's-a-question-of theme introduced by Rich Green ("At this point, it is not a question of whether, but it is a question of how"). Jonathan's question isn't where, Jonathan tells us, it's when. Meaning that where you watch a movie or where an advertiser reaches you is less interesting than when. And this leads inexorably to the logical conclusion that we need a new platform for web authoring/cellphone development. Although I may have missed a step or two in the derivation.

Some were surprised. But now we know why Sun picked up SavaJe Technologies. Here's a diagram. And here's where to get involved.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 06:30 PM  Permalink |

In the days before a big conference, like this week's JavaOne, a tech editor's mailbox starts to fill up with notices saying: 'I will be in flight most of tomorrow. Please address all press queries to my assistant, Foo Bazz.'

It's the calm before the storm. All this week there will be a flurry of breathless announcements of technological breakthroughs of staggering importance from JavaOne. Transitive, for example, has something they think is pretty important for you to know about on Tuesday. Watch this space as the week progresses, and we'll try to keep you informed about some of the announcements that we consider noteworthy.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:54 PM  Permalink |