JAVAONE: Sun's second act?

Reflections of a former Sun evangelist

By Max Goff, JavaWorld.com, 07/05/04

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Bill Joy was absent. Having left Sun himself, there was probably no reason for the former chief scientist and Sun founder to attend. And while his presence was never assured at prior shows, he did manage to attend a few previous JavaOne conferences. His presence this year might have been viewed as positive for his struggling former company; his absence assured more questions.

Bill Gates didn't make it either, but his shadow was evident throughout the event, one of those elephants in the room that no one would acknowledge. The sound of Scott McNealy biting his tongue echoed loudly after his keynote. Now that Microsoft bashing is no longer his main shtick, the middle-aged CEO was obviously missing the absence of his decade-tested quip base. I could hear him getting close to a Redmond slam and then watched as he repressed what must by now be instinctive. The only time he let it slip was during his wrap-up, a "Where's the Outrage" junket, when McNealy cited viruses (as in Microsoft viruses) as a source of much global duress and yet little apparent institutional (read governmental) concern. "There are only two developer communities left on the planet," he had said earlier. Bridging the two (Java and .Net) is the essence of the 10-year collaborative agreement between the two firms. Does that mean that Java and .Net will interoperate? Probably, but I wouldn't hold my breath as to the sanctity of the Java community or the continuing cleanliness of the code base over the next few years, Sun's "benevolent stewardship" notwithstanding.

Also MIA was John Gage. The venerable Gage, Java's chief chaplain, had other duties to attend to. Gage, whose steadfast, father-knows-best personae has grounded the event since it began, had better things to do, leaving a relatively young, wannabe comic (short of writing staff, it would seem) to emcee Sun's flagship event.

It's going to be another long year for SUNW. Alas, end of Act One. Curtain down.

The Big Question

What has set Sun apart from so many other companies is a certain philosophical thread, an aberration of corporate thinking, which is almost anti-capitalistic at times. Consider Joy's Law, an intellectual break-through that is the essence of the open source movement: "Innovation happens elsewhere." The long version of Bill Joy's contribution to corporate IP acknowledges that no matter who you are, the smartest people in the world do not work for you. Innovation will inevitably occur in other locales, with other teams, by other geniuses in other companies. As such, if one would benefit from that inevitable innovation, one must embrace a strategy that would leverage such occurrences: hence, open source.

Sun has a long history of contributing to and supporting open source and community source kinds of efforts. Despite recent wrangling by IBM (and others) that Sun should fully open source Java (the Big Question), Sun's record with respect to the opening of source bases is far superior to that of any firm...ever. The debate on the last day of JavaOne, in which Sun's James Gosling and Rob Gingell joined Brian Behlendorf (CollabNet), James Governor (RedMonk), Justin Shaffer (MLB Advanced Media), Rod Smith (IBM), and Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University) with moderator Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media) in a discussion of open source Java and its merits versus the continuation of the benevolent stewardship role that McNealy articulated ("somebody's got to be in charge or nobody is"), was instructive but unclear. It is somewhat ironic that Sun is on the defensive in this discussion, in light of the firm's history—it's like John Kerry defending his Vietnam War metals against a National-Guard-absent George W. Bush. But clearly, a more open Java is on the table and likely to be a contentious issue until it isn't.