(LinuxWorld) -- I found interesting comments in an interview Robert McMillan conducted with Scott McNealy. Let me sum up McNealy's views, and what I think is right and wrong with them. While it's not my intention to alter a subtlety in McNealy's argument, please send me a message if you believe I have, and include an explanation of where I went wrong.
Point 1: Open source screws up revenue models
McNealy believes open source is screwing up Sun's revenue models. The result is that Sun does not have enough money to market Sun ONE to the same degree that Microsoft markets .NET. The result could be a total win for .NET.I can't deny that open source is screwing up revenue models, and not only Sun's but also the revenue models for many companies. It is also difficult to refute his contention that this cripple's Sun's ability to market Sun ONE effectively. I would like to say there is a sense of balance because open source is interfering with both Sun and Microsoft's revenue models. But Sun doesn't have the billions in the bank that Microsoft has accumulated over the years through an abuse of monopoly power, so Sun is at an unfair disadvantage.
At a personal level, I admit some sympathy for McNealy's views. In the first place, I'd hate to see Sun ONE suffer at the hand of either Microsoft's marketing bucks or the economic effects of open source, because I happen to admire the Sun ONE vision and the technologies behind it. My sense of fairness says Sun should get some benefit from the R&D efforts it has put into J2EE and all of the other technologies it developed. Worse, if .NET wins because open source undermined Sun's revenue model, that would not only be bad for Sun, but for the open source community, as well.
More important, however, is that I would like to see someone -- Sun or anyone else -- engage in an effective marketing campaign that exposes the misinformation behind the .NET campaign. It just so happens that Sun is the company most motivated to do this, since it has a reasonably complete alternative to .NET, Sun ONE. Sun ONE is, as McNealy states elsewhere in the interview, based primarily on open standards, open protocols and open interfaces, so it is far less likely to lock you into Sun as a vendor than .NET locks you into Microsoft. As alternatives to both .NET and open source go, Sun ONE has a lot going for it.
The problem I have with McNealy's complaint is that he's making it with blinders on. It's entirely possible that McNealy isn't telling the whole story here, or that if he is, it will be revealed in the complete interview. (The article includes only a portion of this interview.) Scott assumes Sun has only one way to make money, and open source is gumming up those works. The flaw in his reasoning is that there isn't only one way to make money.
Yes, open source is screwing up conventional software revenue models. However, nobody is holding a gun to McNealy's head to force Sun to stick to conventional revenue models.
IBM was probably the first company to reinvent itself around a viable model for the future. Ironically, IBM took its first step in this direction when it gave up on some of its software products (such as OS/2 and SmartSuite), endorsed Java, and started promoting open standards as the only reasonable course of action. As a former user and fan of OS/2, I resented IBM's move back then, and I resented even more that it was induced in part by Microsoft's refusal to let IBM license Windows 95 for a reasonable price unless it put the brakes on OS/2.
