SWAINE'S CAFE

Black. No Sugar. Extra Caffeine.

November 2006

So Java has been freed. Free as in speech, one is traditionally required to add, not as in lunch, as which there reputedly ain't no such thing.

But to the mobile phone vendors who have invested in Java code in their products, the idea of being thrown on the tender mercies of GPLv2 virality could feel like finding themselves naked in public. So Sun is offering them a blanket: keep your commercial license and ignore all that GPL stuff -- for now, anyway. The freeing of Java seems a little complicated, but one guesses that freedom is never free.

Meanwhile, balancing this headlong rush toward communism, Sun's blogging CEO issues the 1980s capitalist-sounding message that cache is king but rejects the 1990s meme that thin is in. Which reminds one of recent 1980s-retro-sounding pronouncements on the virtues of being filthy rich:

"[Filthy rich clients] are so graphically rich that they ooze cool, they suck the user in from the outset and hang onto the user with a death grip of excitement, they make the user tell their friends about the applications." -Chet Haase, Sun Microsystems.

Personally, I'm not attracted by the idea of being sucked into a death grip by something that oozes, but maybe that's just another of those 1980s things.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:02 PM  Permalink |

Go read Eric Bruno's blog on Sun's big news. Then come back here and I'll explain why the announcement made me nostalgic.

When Sun wanted to tell the world about open-sourcing Java, it did so the old-fashioned way: by emailing out a press release.

I remember press releases, news embargoes, non-disclosure agreements, even in-person interviews. How quaint such primitive modes of communication seem today.

These days when Sun wants to lift the veil and let the world know what it's up to, it is likely to issue invitations to a Second Life virtual world event. Or just blog it.

Sun's CEO famously blogs about new technologies and new directions for the company. But seemingly everyone in the company blogs, and Sun actively uses blogs as its primary means for communicating with, at least, the developer community.

What I miss in all this blog-entry bite-sized openness is the Big Picture.

I get it that Sun doesn't believe in thin clients, that Java is a platform -- or several platforms, that Sun wants to claim the shipping-container-sized datacenter market, and that Jonathan thinks that Sun can walk and chew gum at the same time.

What I don't get is how it all fits together, the unifying vision of what kind of company Sun is today. I don't mean a slogan, I mean a product grid, along with a plausible plan for how the company makes money in each square of the grid.

Maybe at JavaOne Sun will explain the Making Money from Open-Sourcing Java strategy. In the meantime I'll keep reading the blogs, looking for clues.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 09:51 AM  Permalink |

Sun Microsystems is unusual even among technology companies in its encouragement of employee blogs.

Of course there's the highly-unusual CEO's blog, but the company's policy on blogging is worth a read. And Sun is not naive about how an employee blogger could hurt the company.

But employee blogs are turning out to be a good place to go to track what's really going on. When Sun partnered with the University of Kent on the NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition, Ian Utting of U Kent vlogged in Sun's blog space about this beginner's Java tool. Incensed by rumors that Java doesn't work on Windows Vista, Sun's Chet Haase blogged to the contrary. And, responding to a high-news-value development, CEO Jonathan Schwartz links to YouTube video of Jonathan and Sun's Chief Technologist Greg Papadopoulos on Oracle's decision to fork Linux. (Hey, that's Jonathan's choice of words, not mine.)

And maintaining a place for ex-employees to blog is either brilliant or loony. My guess is, brilliant.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 10:41 AM  Permalink |