McNealy Says Software Wants To Be Free
The explosive growth of companies such as Red Hat Software, which makes a business of free software, and the rise of open source software, is forcing companies to look at alternative methods of business beside selling packages of software.
Sun has followed the trend, releasing the source code of its variant of the Unix operating system under its "community" scheme that requires royalties be paid to Sun on any revenue from commercial products derived from changes to the code. This is a modification of the pure open source model, where the underlying code to a product is set free, with no restrictions.
Java, the programming language developed by Sun, is growing. According to Venture Development, a Natick, Mass.-based research company, embedded devices shipping with Java are expected to increase, from 298,000 in 1999 to 24.3 million by 2003.
Sun has posted the source code for Java on the Internet and lets developers use it under the community source licensing model under similar conditions to the Solaris model.
Sun is losing money on Java, McNealy said.
"We are not charging what we are spending and every year we are losing more," he said. "We haven't found the best way to move Java forward, but what we have done is better than it was a year ago. The R&D you get with a Java license is one of the great bargains in the history of the computing industry."
McNealy said Sun can move the development of Java faster than can an international standards organization.
"I don't know of any independent standards organization that has a record of speed," he said. "We're trying to move it at the speed of light. At Sun, we have an 18-year track of moving things toward more open, more inclusive, and cheaper."
For companies like Sun to stay in business, McNealy asked the audience to "take all the money you spend on software and spend it on hardware."
