Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Sun. It's a Little Bit Funny, This Feeling Inside.
I have to admit, I'm pretty addicted to Sun's blog roller, a giant aggregate of Sun employee blogs, highlighted by chatty Sun President/ COO, Jonathan Schwartz.
As an open source, uh... enthusiast, my opinion of JS depends on the context. My heart lights up, and I feel total admiration and appreciation when he's defining and defending basic open source and open standard concepts to semi-clueless business audiences. Plus, it's nice being able to make a radical idea seem kinda legit by adding "...like the President of Sun says!" If you have an audience of totally square peeps, it's much easier to sell Freedom without having to invoke the Buddha or Che Guevara. It's much preferable to invoke a billion dollar corporate executive (just Photoshop out the ponytail!).
But sometimes when JS is among a more open source literate crowd, I kinda wince. He doesn't say anything that offensive or hypocritical, but maybe it seems like he's uncomfortable being held up against bolder manifestations of his/ Sun's own ideologies. I don't think his public defense of patents is totally complete. Sure, I sympathize with the position Sun is in. Though I don't believe in patents, if I ran a company in a competitive environment where all my competitors went after patents... I'd feel the pressure to apply for a few. But at the same time, he doesn't need to pay them so much lip service. Couldn't he just say "Look, patents are dumb, but Law hasn't caught up with Reason, so we're gonna play this way to protect ourselves."? Sheesh.
Lots of open source advocates think the fact that Sun's Java isn't traditionally open source represents some sort of larger anti-open source strategy by Sun. JS constantly defends the state of Java, and how much open source street cred Sun has. I do think Sun has demonstrated its commitment to open source stuff. They have lots of great, generous contributions. But it does suck at community a bit, and it's a bummer to see great, free ideas go unused. But it doesn't bother me that Java isn't vanilla GPL. (Maybe it's because I don't really like Java in the first place?) Overall though, I feel like it's way more of a bummer that Sun isn't better at pimping all of its true Open Source contributions, than it is that Java isn't traditionally Open as other stuff out there.
I have to admit, I'm pretty addicted to Sun's blog roller, a giant aggregate of Sun employee blogs, highlighted by chatty Sun President/ COO, Jonathan Schwartz.
As an open source, uh... enthusiast, my opinion of JS depends on the context. My heart lights up, and I feel total admiration and appreciation when he's defining and defending basic open source and open standard concepts to semi-clueless business audiences. Plus, it's nice being able to make a radical idea seem kinda legit by adding "...like the President of Sun says!" If you have an audience of totally square peeps, it's much easier to sell Freedom without having to invoke the Buddha or Che Guevara. It's much preferable to invoke a billion dollar corporate executive (just Photoshop out the ponytail!).
But sometimes when JS is among a more open source literate crowd, I kinda wince. He doesn't say anything that offensive or hypocritical, but maybe it seems like he's uncomfortable being held up against bolder manifestations of his/ Sun's own ideologies. I don't think his public defense of patents is totally complete. Sure, I sympathize with the position Sun is in. Though I don't believe in patents, if I ran a company in a competitive environment where all my competitors went after patents... I'd feel the pressure to apply for a few. But at the same time, he doesn't need to pay them so much lip service. Couldn't he just say "Look, patents are dumb, but Law hasn't caught up with Reason, so we're gonna play this way to protect ourselves."? Sheesh.
Lots of open source advocates think the fact that Sun's Java isn't traditionally open source represents some sort of larger anti-open source strategy by Sun. JS constantly defends the state of Java, and how much open source street cred Sun has. I do think Sun has demonstrated its commitment to open source stuff. They have lots of great, generous contributions. But it does suck at community a bit, and it's a bummer to see great, free ideas go unused. But it doesn't bother me that Java isn't vanilla GPL. (Maybe it's because I don't really like Java in the first place?) Overall though, I feel like it's way more of a bummer that Sun isn't better at pimping all of its true Open Source contributions, than it is that Java isn't traditionally Open as other stuff out there.
