Sun's move to GPL Java shades of failed Xerox: analyst

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 15 November 2006 13:38

Strategy

According to a longstanding Sun Microsystems watcher, the move by Sun to make Java available under the open source GPLv2 license will benefit just about everyone in the IT community except Sun, the company who created the programming language.

According to Dr Kevin McIsaac, who as a Meta Group analyst predicted the demise of Sun back in 2001, believes that there are a lot of synergies between Sun and another great technology company Xerox.

"Both companies have invented great technology but other companies are the ones making money on it," says Dr McIsaac, who is now an analyst at Australian and New Zealand based firm IBRS.

"Who invented photocopying? Who invented PostScript (printing language)? Who invented the computer windowing system? The answer in all cases is Xerox. So much great technology was invented at Xerox Technology Park. How much money did they make on the technology? Very little. The reason is that they didn't know how to transform themselves from being a photocopier sales company into a high-tech computer company."

Dr McIsaac believes that for the past five years Sun has been going the way of Xerox. "They're a high-end hardware company that have been unable to transform themselves into anything else," he says. "Making Java open source is great buy how is it going to help them?"

"The only reason that you would make Java available under the GPL is that it means you can ship it with every Linux distro. In the past there has always been the problem that you could get all the nice Java software that comes with Linux but you didn't get Java because it's not GPL. By doing this, they've resolved what Richard Stallman has referred to as the Java Trap. That's great for Linux, for Java developers and for Java users.

"However, given that Sun appears to make very little from Java itself directly this is great for the community but means little for Sun."