The Winning Strategy
Time to write about open source again! Jonathan wrote a blog entry which is commented by a reader being the most concise explanation for the open source strategy of Sun. He picks up on Microsoft claiming that free software like Linux violates more than 200 of its patents.
I already referred to the Microsoft Novell announcement concerning the SUSE Linux distribution that was from that day positioned as the only secure Linux (means safe from litigation in terms of violating Microsoft patents) on the planet by Microsoft due to Novell paying royalties to Microsoft.
As Jonathan puts it: “no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software” which is proven again by the results of a survey published by Forrester Research some time ago: Open Source Software’s Expanding Role in the Enterprises” subtitled “Companies Adopt Open Source as Standard.”
486 IT Managers participated in the survey, 50% already using open source software and amongst those another 50% for mission critical applications. 
Saving licensing cost is not the major argument for using free software, most IT Managers are appreciating the support of open standards, the use without any restrictions and not being locked in. The possibility of adapting the application to own needs and gaining efficiencies with internal processes is another key argument. In regards of the service expectations software maintenance, lifecycle support and integration with other software components are at the top of the wish list.
Our open source strategy is really paying off! Some time ago everyone really wondered how we could make money giving all the software away for free. Now we are seeing increasing revenue based on subscriptions. And as we see above the services piece should not be underestimated. No company would deploy a critical application without being sure to get the support they need! So basically we are securing our position as one of the big players through open source as this is the model of the future, secondly all people can use our software for free and thirdly we are increasing our business! Isn't that squaring the circle?
Posted at
10:35PM May 22, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Economy and Open Source Software
A study has been prepared for the European Commission on the “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU.”
It turns out that shared software (open source or as referred to in the study: FLOSS – Free/Libre/Open Source Software) has a huge positive impact on the whole economy in many different ways. Starting from generating programming and communication skills for the participating developers to an amount of EUR 12 billion in monetary value that comes from the existing code base which is doubling in size every 18-24 months! Using open source software potentially saves the industry over 36% in R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be spent in other areas of innovation.
Coming back to the EU's Lisbon goals of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010 open source software can contribute to provide a skills development environment valued by employers and retaining a greater share of value add locally (the study shows that the EU is significantly loosing talent in science and engineering to the US). This environment combined with the comparatively higher share of open source developers in Europe could encourage the creation of new software businesses which is limited here compared to the US due to restricted venture capital and risk tolerance.
Concrete statement: “Increased use of open source software may provide a way for Europe to compensate for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US. A growth and innovation simulation model shows that increasing the open source software share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself – i.e. over Euro 10 billion annually.”
And just a modest note on Sun: the study made proof that we are the No. 1 contributor (by far) to the open source community. Not sure how many times open office is mentioned in the study but you'll read it very frequently going through...
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Posted at
07:34AM Jan 19, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Sun Opens Java
Today is a great day for Sun and the Java developer community. As part of our effort to open source all our software over time we announced that the whole Java Platform will be free software under the GPL licence! This means that as Linux our Java software can be used, modified and redistributed. GPL is probably one of the licences allowing most freedom for handling open software.
Read Jonathan's Blog on this, he calls it “A rising tide lifts all boats” or fueling the network effect. Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. It runs on 8 out of 10 cell phones. By open sourcing Java, Sun drives down the barriers to adoption of the Java Platform in the Internet. “Volume drives Value”: the more developers, devices and new services are on the internet, the more demand there is for the network innovation Sun is creating.
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Posted at
11:32PM Nov 13, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Prague
I have been in Prague last week. It was very exciting. We have an engineering center and a sales office there. The site has become more and more important over the past years. Recently we opened our new offices in a very modern technology park a little bit outside the city, very fancy and stylish (to learn more Czech this out).
We grew the site from the initial netbeans acquisition in 1999 with 40 people to over 240 in engineering today. Netbeans has now around 100 employees. They just released Netbeans 5.5. last week. Netbeans is a developer tool supporting them to write Java code (a programming language invented by a team around James Gosling from Sun Microsystems widely known as the “father of Java”). We got a live demo of the tool. They showed us how quickly you can develop an SMS application for a mobile phone (almost every mobile phone is equipped with Java today). When you first see it you do not believe it is a developer tool. The user interface has the same look and feel as any other application the average end-user is working with. You can drag & drop and go to menus to select standard functionality. After 10min, only writing minimal lines of code, the application was running on the emulator, “beamed” to a cell phone and also running live! Really cool! Congratulations to the Netbeans team for their new release!
One of the main purposes of my trip was to work with Pavel, our Engineering Site Director, on the HR Strategy for the site and listen to his management team (Pavel promised me to continue his blog). As already mentioned in my blog about Our HR Organization there are issues around our outsourcing model that we need to tackle. We had really good discussions and NO, they “did not beat me up” 
most of them were accepting our HR model in general, we just need to make the services work well and might need some adjustments here and there. Overall I got a lot of insight in what they are doing and where the biggest needs are. They are really a fantastic team!
Then I accompanied Dan to the meeting he had with his peers from the EMEA practices here in Europe as VP (Vice President) of our EMEA Systems Engineering Organization. Dan moved to Prague earlier this year to provide technical leadership and serve as a liaison by collaborating with the local engineering community and amplifying their innovation, best practices, and technical excellence on top of his main job being one of our CTOs (Chief Technical Officers). Some months ago he added this VP job to that. Really great for us as we now have one of the brightest geeks in our company giving technical vision and direction to our EMEA Sales Organization!
Dan did a great job in hosting the meeting and the final highlight was a kind of geek session updating ourselves on Sun Technology. Thanks to Dan's ability to explain complex technology in simple words I got a lot out of it!
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Posted at
04:40PM Nov 04, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Europe & Beyond |
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