Stratocaster

Friday June 03, 2005

Learning to Share I'm very excited about Sun's new "Share" brand image. Why? Because finally Sun the corporation is talking to the world about what makes me want to come to work everyday. I've always felt that Sun is about community, participation, and sharing. It is so gratifying to see the company's image to the world be about the things that make Sun a fun place to work for me. The open and cooperative spirit I've seen so often with the teams and people I work with should help Sun be in the right spot to turn opportunities into good business as the industry moves into the Participation Age.

Sun has sometimes been accused of not playing nice with others. I've always thought this to be strange, because it conflicts so directly with my everyday experience. But a recent conversation I had with Jonathan Eunice at Illuminata crystallized for me one source of friction. Its not enough for Sun to make it easy to participate in Sun-sponsored projects like OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, Java, etc. Is Sun also willing to participate in others' projects?

Perhaps Sun hasn't done as good a job at highlighting its employees' participation in non-Sun efforts as in talking about how others can contribute to Sun's communities. In his blog, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady points to Sun's contributions to the accessibility toolkit component of the GNOME desktop project as one example of Sun engineers contributing their sweat equity. Another example: the Mozilla Foundation called out Sun's contribution to Firefox in the credits line of their New York Times advertisement (pdf), in appreciation of work done on the version 1.0 source base by Sun engineers. There are many other unsung examples... but they're unsung, and that is Jonathan Eunice's point.

Doing even more, and singing that song a bit louder might help change the perception that Sun should learn to share.
(2005-06-03 08:00:50.0) Permalink Comments [0]