Sun 'can be biggest open source company'

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 29 January 2009 03:45

Opinion and Analysis

iTWire: In your experience, thinking long-term, involving the community, means a better revenue stream?

Monty: Of course. The whole bet I and David and Allan made at the beginning was looking long term. That's why in the end we got Sun to pay us $US1 billion. If we had just looked at the short-term we would never be here. From Sun's point of view, the little money that MySQL generates is insignificant for anything for Sun. It's a nice revenue stream, but you don't even see it. What's much more important for Sun is that MySQL is an enabler to take Sun to places it has not been before. That means that it's important that we have to spread. The money stream is actually not important.

iTWire: That means it will help to raise Sun's profile in the community.

Monty: Yes. I believe that Sun has a golden opportunity to be the biggest and most important company in the open source world. Unfortunately Sun has internal problems, as you can see from the stock price. And they haven't really decided what they want to do. Jonathan Schwartz has over and over again said how important it is to focus on the open source market and I believe him. What he believes is right. He doesn't seem to be able to get his organisation to do what needs to be done. And I have been trying to be in Sun, screaming and kicking, and trying to get them to take the right direction. Something has changed, but it's a big organisation. It changes just so slowly.

As you can see with OpenSolaris. Sun believes that OpenSolaris is much better than Linux and that everybody should use OpenSolaris. But they haven't understood the fact that if you take a normal Linux developer, he doesn't want to use OpenSolaris, just because it's different, and because Sun says, "it's better, it has a better package manager". My theory of open source developers is that people are lazy and in a hurry and they don't have any time left. That means that they don't want to install something if it's just slightly better to learn something new, if what they have now is good enough. And Sun hasn't realised that.

iTWire: Do you think OpenSolaris will fail?

Monty: It will fail if they don't change the direction drastically. If they make OpenSolaris so that a Linux user sits down and they don't feel any difference, except that things are going faster, then they have succeeded. But you can't have things in different paths, you can't have different package managers. It should just work as you expected - then OpenSolaris has a chance. This is something I and other people in MySQL have been pitching to Sun, and some people are starting to get it. But it's a struggle. But I mean, these are the kinds of things that Sun has to realise. And if they do that, they will have a really glorious future.

iTWire: And they can become the biggest open source company...

Monty: I think they have a possibility. but I don't know if they can reach it, because they have too many people who are looking at the short-term money stream. Like Marten in the database group. Instead of trying to say, "so, where can we be after 10 years?" The disagreement between me and the rest of the MySQL management is that I've always tried to look at 10 years, what's best for the company after 10 years. I believe that the bigger user base you have, and the happier users you have, the better off you are. And in that case, that means that to be the richest possible company after 10 years, you really need to believe and put your effort in open source. And the community.