IW: Sun has been criticized for coming up with technologies and not making any money off of them. How would you respond to that?
I'm thinking of Java and maybe NFS (Network File System).
Green: Well, I guess I strongly disagree. You know, I think it’s a comment more on accounting than it is on business. We don’t publish
our software number breakout and I think that may drive some of the concerns of others. But when you look at the position
of Solaris in the industry as the preeminent a Unix platform and increasingly growing in leadership in the open source operating
system space, it would be hard to question whether or not our software investment in that area has contributed to the company’s
success. Our developer programs [are] driving new applications and new ISVs to our platform. In fact, in 2006, we doubled
the number of developers enrolled in our Sun Developer Network Program, which is our whole developer campaign. These are going
from one million to two million developers. These are folks who are directly connected and affiliated with Sun as developers.
IW: Is Sun making more or less money from Solaris since you open sourced it?
Green: We don’t release the financial figures, but certainly the growth in the open source activity is probably an indicator of
how we’re doing as a business.
IW: What’s the status of the open-sourcing of Java at this point?
Green: Well, we announced in May at JavaOne that we’re going to be doing it. We’re still working through some of the issues of licensing
and working with all of the partners who have contributed to Java to make sure that we’re all in alignment about the license
and intellectual property management in the Java stack. We announced that we will be actually releasing first bits of it before
the end of this calendar year, and we’re on track to do so. So it’s a very exciting time to move that whole program along.
IW: It’s going to be done in a kind of an incremental fashion?
Green: As we noted, there are blocks of code that we’ll be open sourcing initially and we’ll get the whole lot done through the
first quarter of the next calendar year. So it will be a continuous process. All of Java SE and all of Java ME should be completed,
in terms of open source availability, by the end of the first quarter of calendar ’07.
IW: And what about the Enterprise Edition?
Green: Well, the Enterprise Edition is already open source. The GlassFish Project was released as open source last year. And so
that was the first step in the open source availability of Java, and these are the next two steps.
IW: How are you addressing the potential for forking and what’s really the difference between open source Java and the way it
always was?
Green: Well, the truth of this is that Java, for the last year or two, has been developed in a completely open forum. You know,
GlassFish, the latest release of SE, have all been available in source code form for developers to read and review and comment
on for the last 18 months. And so from the aspect of transparency and open source, that’s already been done. The issue here
is really focused around changing the license, and in that regard, it’s a significant change in the industry in terms of availability
and flexibility. The real value to us is being able to make Java available to all of those organizations and all of those
distributions who require an open source style license for inclusion in their [distributions], inclusion in their ISV products
or their open source programs. And so this is really almost a licensing version of compatibility. By making this stuff available
not only as transparent access to the code which we’ve already done, but changing it so that the legal description of access,
there is likely to be a much greater uptake of Java in many of the open source programs in the industry.
IW: Now, would you say that Sun is doing the open-sourcing kind of kicking and screaming or is this is being done willfully?
Green: You know, I dragged on it for years. It was my fifth day back when we announced it. And so I think it was -- is on my list
of really critically important items to get behind us. I think that the world has changed a lot. With regard to compatibility,
compatibility can be seen as being managed in a number of ways. One, by offering tests and suites to ensure that the technology
is in fact compatible. But the largest collection of compatibility tests in the Java world are all of the millions of applications
on the desktop, on the handset, on the server, that have been produced out there. And so there is an increasing body of work
that compels anybody dealing with Java to keep the technology compatible, because if it isn’t, apps won’t run and people will
reject the variants that people create. So my assessment, and I think the assessment of many at Sun, is we’re at the point
now where there is such a mass of application investment that the risk of incompatibility is extremely low and thus it’s time
to do it.
IW: Has the Java platform outlasted Java language. Are we going to see more scripting languages and the like on the Java Virtual
Machine rather than people just sticking strictly to using the Java language?
Green: I think that’s a really good point. And, in fact, at Sun’s first instance of our 9th annual season of Sun Tech Days, I and
others discussed the fact that we’ll be heading towards a model in which the virtual machine will be a platform upon which
others can host new frameworks and new languages in addition to Java. And I just think this is of value. As we see more people
innovating at the language level and at the framework level, they are forced to produce virtual machine technology that is
not nearly as mature and robust as the Java VM. And so we’ll be offering up that platform as a vehicle to promote the development
of new languages in addition to Java. So we still see the number of developers migrating to Java growing all the time, the
numbers are very positive. The number of developers, as I said, doubled in 2006. But there’s more that people want to do,
we have great technology to foster that work, and we’re doing it.
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