Dec 2

FREE Software - are you listening !!   Posted by sharps, tagged with java

Now some of the dust has settled regarding Sun's announcement yesterday - I can respond to some of the opinions forming in the press.

First let me turn to the Register article by Gavin Clarke. Clearly Gavin is hard of listening because he didn't fully get what was announced yesterday. Gavin, here's another way to look at it - yesterday we announced that we're changing the evaluation license of the Java Enterprise System - it used to be a (completely unenforced) 90 day evaluation we've now changed that from 90 days to infinity and we don't care if your evaluation runs into production and becomes the underlying infrastructure to power your business. Go for it. The rest is business as usual - if you want to go into production and you want the kind of world-wide, business critical support you would expect from a company like Sun, and you want us to fix the bugs that YOU think are important and you want us to indemnify you then it's business as usual - you have to become a customer - you have to buy the Java Enterprise System (or Suites).

Here's another way to think about it. With our US$150 / employee / year - which includes products, support, training and consulting credits we never really told anyone how that breaks down - we don't provide an itemized bill. So yesterday's announcement changed nothing for many - most customers will continue to pay the subscription - the ability to deploy for free is unlikely to be that attractive for many customers, though I grant there may be a few. Losing a few revenue customers will be dramatically offset by the increase in volume that this announcement will drive.

Let me address some of the other clap-trap Gavin peddles as news :

"Despite the decision to "give away" its rather poorly architected application server two years ago, for example, Sun's market share has declined. It has also declined despite a crafty rebranding exercise that turned Sun's application server into the reference implementation for all Java application servers."

I know nothing about Gavin but I'm guessing he knows nothing (or very little) about Application Servers and I'm guessing he wouldn't know a "poorly architected application server" from a female African Elephant. I'd be happy (delighted) to help Gavin understand about Application Servers and specifically how great Sun's current product is. This isn't rhetoric - Gavin - I'm available anytime you want to do some more in depth research - just get in touch.

Lori McVittie (of Network Computing) really does know about Application Servers (among other stuff) and here's what she said about Sun's Application Server (in June this year) :

"Now supporting J2EE 1.4, Sun's new app server strongly competes with IBM's WebSphere on features--and beats it on price."

Note, Lori didn't just dream this up - she spent to days in the lab playing with the product (as she has others) - that's what I call research.

OK, last point - Gavin talks about Market share - I don't know where he gets his numbers from (maybe he just asked Marc Fleury) he doesn't say - I have many other data points that show we have a significant share of the developer and production market - and it is a bit more realistic than IDC's revenue-based share studies (or JBoss's heresay).