No one can deny that Sun Microsystems is one of the most important tech-industry players today, both in business and in “geek interest”. Yet it also seems to be the source of much controversy among geeks, especially those interested and involved in Open Source and Free Software.

I’ve always wondered why that is. I have to say that my impression of Sun is, and always has been, quite favourable. On purely technical merits, the SPARC platform has always been good and powerful, Solaris is the best Unix-like OS I’ve used and I think Java is cool now as well as being extremely innovative when it launched ten years ago.

I could understand it if people got uppity about Java exclusively. I think it’s well done, suited to it’s purpose and is being well managed by Sun, who seem to favour technical merits and usefulness. However, there is the point RMS makes that since Java isn’t Free, nothing done in Java can be considered Free because it requires a non-Free environment to execute. Personally, I don’t lose sleep over this, much in the same way I don’t worry about the BIOS in my computer being closed-source, for example, but for some people I know it’s important.

Still, is this a good reason for holding an entire company, responsable for much more, in low esteem? Let’s consider some of the good stuff:

• They have a senior executive, Jonathan Schwartz, blogging about the company in an open fashion, and writing posts that make it look like they have their heads in the right place over important issues.
• Obviously, they’ve also released Solaris as Open Source, under a real Open license, making it one of the biggest contributions to the OS community ever. Other big contributions include OpenOffice.org and several open standards such as RPC and NFS.
• The SPARC architecture is open, freely implementable by anyone and royalty-free, in stark contrast to Intel’s x86, for instance, where everything must be clean-room implemented in order to compete with them.
• Finally, the Java Community Process is not perfect, but it’s much better than, say, Microsoft’s completely hermetic approach to, well, everything.

So why the hostility? The only thing that can be interpreted as problematic is their acceptance of $20 million as settlement from Microsoft over the whole Java on Windows fiasco. I think geeks everywhere were expecting Sun to stand up to Microsoft and teach them a lesson and what actually happened looked more like Sun being bought off. Now, I don’t know what exactly a court sentence against Microsoft would have achieved in this case, but I do know that Sun is in the business of making money and not of risking everything on a long drawn-out court case. Hell, even Linus himself is not beyond making some easy money.

So that’s my reasoning. What do you think? Have I got it completely ass-backwards?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2005 at 2:42 am and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.