Last month, Sun Microsystems released the source code of its Solaris operating system to the general public in an attempt to increase community interest. Now they are at it again, with a far more ambitious plan. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz has announced that the company plans to offer all of it's software for free.
Details are still a little bit thin and the exact nature of Sun's new distribution model has not yet been made clear. Yo, Schwartz, do you mean free as in freedom or free as in Java? Sun has had a tough time staying relevent in an open source world where IBM and Redhat are the latest buzz. The liberation of Solaris source code helped Sun to establish a community, perhaps this new development is part of a plan to expand that community.
Impediments abound as limitations in Sun's open source license deter involvement of many open source community members. The open Solaris code has been released under the OSI certified Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is mostly based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Unfortunately, the CDDL contains conditions that make it incompatible with the GPL, the popular open source license used by the Linux kernel and many other notable projects. It is likely that Sun will use the CDDL if they choose to open the rest of their offerings.
At this point, it is hard to tell if "free" is synonymous with "open" in Sun's vernacular. Frankly, I don't think Schwartz is quite sure either, he says things like: "We've been trying to faithfully explore how to deliver our products and technologies for free." In his favor, he does seem to be rather enthusiastic about open source, which he says "is having a [highly] productive role in driving innovation, driving down cost." Of course, now that he is on the bandwagon, he won't miss an opportunity to deride those that are not:
It's going to be tough for folks that are keeping their technologies in a closed-source environment to convince [the market] that they're serious about interoperability.
Sun has a history of open source hypocrisy. They have been promising open source Java for over a year now. Maybe they will finally make good on that promise. Last month, Sun open sourced the Java System Application Server Platform Edition (Glass Fish), which Schwartz says is "the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun's Java software assets."
Sun has dropped a few hints about how they plan to profit from their slow crawl towards open source. Matt Thompson, Sun's director for technology outreach said that by opening Solaris, "we stand to gain more because we will still charge for technical support contracts." Schwartz has said that "The net upside of [a free distribution model] is we get more people engaged in our community." In his blog, Schwartz says:
Free is a compelling price to drive adoption. Best of all, it's not subject to bizarre multipliers based on the number of cores or threads on a computer's microprocessor. And as much as my friend Linus helped change the world of operating systems, something tells me Postgres and MySQL are going to have an interesting blowback effect on the database marketplace - and JES (stay tuned for a momentum update) will bring the same to web application platforms. After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records. And to re-answer the same question: am I worried that changing the price of our software to free will diminish software revenues? No, quite the opposite: I believe it's vital to cause software revenue to grow - based on accelerating adoption. It's far easier to convince a customer to pay for a product they're already using, than one they haven't even tried.
I'm sure many of you have seen the recent surprise box office hit "March of the Penguins", which is oddly characteristic of the corporate open source community. In the movie, the penguins take turns marching back and forth between the sea (where they gorge themselves on fish and krill) and the inland location where they fulfill their obligation to the species by perpetuating it. The harsh antarctic climate is reminiscent of the tech industry, the newborn penguins struggling to survive are like innovation, and the fish and krill are like the fiscal sustenence that a company needs to survive. The penguins must balance their own needs with the needs of their hatchlings in order to ensure mutual survival. Many corporations committed to open source have found themselves in a delicate juggling act as they try to increase revenue while fostering the innovation that will ensure their perpetuation. Sun is like the penguin that strayed from the group and found itself lost in the icy wasteland. Will Sun's instincts enable it to rejoin the group?
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