From Forbes.com Technology writer Daniel Lyons, 25 Feb 2008.
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2008/0225/060.html?partner=yahoomag
Sun talks a good game of embracing open source ideals, but the company is acting out of desperation. Having fallen upon hard times, Sun has open sourced its crown jewels, freely sharing the blueprints for its Sparc microprocessors, Solaris operating system and Java programming language.
It's a great publicity stunt, but how will giving away products Sun already owns, and spending $1 billion to acquire another free product, save Sun? Pixie dust would have to be at work here. It reminds me of a sketch from South Park where gnomes steal underpants as part of a three-phase business plan which goes like this:
1. Collect underpants.
2. ?
3. Profit.
In a similarly fantastic vein, MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos insists that his outfit can reach $1 billion in sales and that hitching up with Sun will get him there faster. A less captive observer might comment that when it comes to acquisitions Sun is like [Novell and] the Bermuda Triangle-- companies (like Cobalt and Pirus Networks) go in and are never heard from again. This promising little software firm could get sucked into Sun and disappear.
MySQL had to know this. My take? The insiders took the money and ran. The lesson of this deal is that "open source culture"--by this I mean that noisy, shaggy, countercultural, money-hating hacker rebellion--is now on the wane. The hippies have built a weapon that the big guys want, and now the hippies are cashing out. (Emphasis added by blog owner.)
