Dave Edstrom's Catalyst Edstrom Photons-Electrons

I was asked on my blog regarding open source by Mabimal on April 17, 2009 at 05:49 AM EDT the following:

The image below is what is commonly called inside Sun, the Rainbow or Donut Blue Print for Open Source Monetization.  The key to this is that the light green is the community version/edition and the orange is the Enterprise Edition.   The Enterprise Edition is based on a revision of the Community Version, but also has the massive scaling, industry specific addons , 24x7 support, best practices, hot fixes and enterprise monitoring that large enterprises will want/need **IF** they do not have the in house expertise.  My personal opinion is if you think you will make all your money off professional services and indemnifcation, you better go back and do some more financial modeling.  Speaking of Professional Services, this is predicated on having a strong support and services organization.

I believe that we will see another layer to this model and that is cloud services.  You can not simply throw your applications into a cloud and think you now have a cloud.  That is like putting a 638hp Chevrolet Corvette LS9 ZR1  engine into a Vega and thinking you now have a sports car :-)   More on adding the cloud layer to the donut or rainbow later.

 Hope this helps Mabimal ....

With all the news today, I just wanted to share some memories of Sun over the past 22 years I have worked here at Sun.  Note, I am still here at Sun, just thought I would take a couple of minutes to write down some of my memories over the many years.

When I first spoke with Sun Microsystems, it was the summer of 1984 and Betsy MacLean (later Ferry) and Steve Ferry had recently went over to Sun Microsystems from Systems Development Corporation (SDC) a Division of Burroughs Corporation.  I met Betsy and Steve while we were all at SDC.  It is interesting to note that SDC based in Santa Monica, California, was arguably the world's first computer software company as noted by Wikipedia.  I was not smart enough to go over to Sun in 1984 :-)  

Sun was founded in 1982 with Sun standing for Stanford University Network (SUN).

In 1986, I was an SE for SDC and technical lead for a HUGE and extremely challenging opportunity for High Performance Workstations opportunity where Sun Microsystems was the digital workstation and Masscomp was the analog workstation of choice.   At the end of 1986 and long after the completion of the bid and benchmarks,  I started talking to Sun Microsystems about working there.   I started on May 4th, 1987.  

Betsy hired me and was a great manager and leader.  My mentor was Neil Groundwater who was clearly the smartest person in computers that I had ever met.  In the summer of 1987 we found out we won the HPW business that has since been worth at least $2 BILLION to Sun Microsystems over the years - yes that is B as in BILLION. Steve Ferry was THE Sales Rep on this opportunity and to this day is far and away the best Sales Rep I have ever seen/worked with and a great friend to this day.

 There are so many people to thank for the great, great memories that I have of Sun Microsystems.  I have to first thank Betsy for hiring me, Neil for being a great mentor and a great friend.  I have worked with and for lots of great individuals for 22 years at Sun.     I had the privilege of working for three great SE Directors - Joy Warfield,  Brad Kirley and Sue Walls who all showed great leadership and courage.  Most importantly, Joy, Brad and Sue firmly believed in the Sun mantra "work hard and play hard".   In the "play hard" vein, Dennis Govoni and I pulled countless pranks on each other and have teamed up with others on some very memorable April Fools Goofs as well.

During the past five years I have been the Chief Technologist for the Software Practice and it has been the most fun I have had at Sun.  I have had the great fortune for working for a true software leader in Dave Profozich.  Dave has been a great leader and friend.

By far, the most fun and rewarding experience I have ever had was working with Dave Patterson of Berkeley on MTConnect.

Finally, a huge special thanks to Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and John Gage.  While John was not officially one of Sun's four founders, he was always known as the "fifth Beatle" and employee #21  John coined the term "The Network Is The Computer".   Below is one of the classic photos that we always used for presentations to show the founders.

I remember Scott McNealy signing my Sun 10 Year Anniversary Yearbook in 1992 with the message:  

I remember being with Bill Joy, John Gage and Neil Groundwater having dinner in Georgetown and the wine list was given to me to select.  This is the classic pig staring at a Rolex watch type of scenario with Dave Edstrom looking at a wine list.  I looked at the list and said, "how about a pitcher of Busch beer?"   Neil Groundwater gave me one of those looks that could kill.  Bill Joy was very cool about it.  Bill said, "Dave, a cold beer sounds good and John, why don't you select a bottle of wine as well."

I could go on and on with stories, but this is enough for today.

It is a sad day when a company that had so much energy and creativity as Sun Microsystems dies.  Sun is probably best known for Java, Solaris and SPARC but there is so much more at Sun Microsystems.   If you worked for Sun during its peak, it was quite the company to work for.  As my oldest son John, who works for Sun as a Campus Ambassador, told me this morning, "Sun had quite a ride."  Yes, it was a great ride!

Who knows how this will all shake it out, but at this time I am reminded of the old phrase, "You can not adjust the wind, you can only adjust your sails...."

There are many individuals who are confused about open source and monetization.

 The first two rules on open source and monetization come from Marten Mickos in 2007 who was CEO from MySQL at the time:

“Success in open source requires you to serve:

                  1. Those who spend time to save money
                  2. Those who spend money to save time."

 The important concept that Marten Mickos is driving home is that just like every other topic on planet earth, open source monetization is not black and white, but a gray scale continuum that we are still discovering some of the finer points.

                1)  There is no guarantee of monetary success just because you have lots of users.

                2) If you ask someone about their monetization strategy and they come back to the concept of lots of users, then they have not a clue what they are talking about.    There is no direct cause and affect between lots of users and guaranteed monetization.   Yes, there is tremendous potential, but just like voltage - which is called potential, what you really want amperage.  If you think this is not true, go google Xerox PARC's history and let me know how well the ROI went there.

                3) There are analogies between open source monetization and every day products that you used today.   Do you buy a warranty for a product that has a reputation for never breaking down?   Probably not, unless your duty cycle is much more strenuous than the typical user.  If you are running a business and you are using free software that never needed to be updated and never broke down would you worry about service?  Probably not.    Are there very many examples of software that you never update?  Unless you are talking about a black box aka embedded application, the answer is not too many.   There is an important analogy between home devices/appliances and enterprise software.  That analogy is duty cycle.

 My uncle, Merle Edstrom owns his own Welding business called Cannon Welding in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.    One of the metrics that Merle cares about is the maximum duty cycle for a welder.  The welding duty cycle is defined as the percentage of time in a 10 minute period that it can be operated continuously before overheating.  As a professional businessman, Merle's duty cycle needs are very different than your typical home owner.  Quick advertisement for my uncle.  If you live anywhere near the mid part of Minnesota, Cannon Welding is the best and you should call Merle for all your welding needs!

In software, duty cycle is defined many different ways, but a common link to hardware duty cycle would be the reliability of the software expressed in the classic SLA or Service Level Agreement.  If my business is running a mission critical open source application (as most are these days), then having a single throat to choke, 24x7x365 support, hot patches, professional services, value added services for massive scaling or vertical industry specifics are just some of the things that I would be willing to pay for.

At Sun we are clearly defining our Community Version and Enterprise Edition software.

More on my favorite (ok, one of my favorite topics :-) later....

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it
        is the quality which guarantees all others."

Winston Churchill

Today is the two year  anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.  As a parent of a VT student (and one more likely to be there next year), it is still hard to comprehend the magnitude of this tragedy.  I put in the Winston Churchill quote because courage is what I think of when I think of the Virginia Tech.

My prayers go out to the family, friends and relatives of the victims....

Today is tax day for Americans. A day everyone just loves :-)   When I think of April 15th, I think of security and how it is more important than ever.  There is an article today that I just saw on Yahoo!

Hackers grabbed more than 285M records in 2008

• By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer - Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:05AM EDT

Jordan Robertson states:   "Hackers made off with at least 285 million electronic records in 2008, more than in the four previous years combined, according to a new study that shows identity thieves are getting better at exploiting careless mistakes that leave companies vulnerable to attack."

The rest of the arrticle can be read here. 

I believe the  days of single factor  authentication are over and the days of securing at the pipe level alone are over as well.  As much as I am not a proponent of big government, I do think there are many valuable services that government has and will do for society.  Does the Internet happen if not for DARPA funding?  I don't think so.  When I think of the right way to do identity management, I think of the DoD's Common Access Card (CAC)  program.

Sun Microsystems was a big part of the CAC program and, we at Sun have taken a similar approach with our Java Card.

Now for a controversial suggestion :-)  Have the US government follow DoD's lead and issue CAC to every single US citizen above the age of 6.  I have kevlar underwear on for this one :-)

Getting away from policy and back to technology, two extremely important standards going forward for security will be SAML and XACML.   More on those in coming days....

Jim Fiori recently presented at Virginia Tech's Association for Computing Machinery Meeting.  My oldest son, John, blogged about Jim's GREAT 2 1/2 presentation.  Jim's slides are also here.

If I was told, "Dave, you get to pick one person on planet earth to solve the most difficult software performance problem mankind has ever seen, and if this person fails, the earth as we know it burns up in an attosecond."

I know exactly who I would pick:  Here's a hint, it would not be Bill Joy, Dave Patterson, Steve Bourne, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Neil Groundwater, Grace Hopper or Bjarne Stroustrup.

No disprespect to those computer legends above, but I would select Jim Fiori.  Jim Fiori is a great example of  Malcom Gladwell's Outliers primary premise, which is you need to get to 10,000 hours of actual hands on experience, along with selecting the right parents, being born at the right time and finally, being in the right place at the right time - Jim Fiori meets all of these criteria.

Jim Fiori is a Principal Field Technologist at Sun Microsystems and is THE GOD IN SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE TUNING AND PROBLEM SOLVING.