The Ashimmy Blog: Is Sun's open source strategy its savior or destroyer?

November 17, 2008

Is Sun's open source strategy its savior or destroyer?

I was reading Steven J Vaughn-Nichols column the other day entitled, "Sun: Dead company walking". Vaughn-Nichols laments that Sun is probably doomed and too bad, just when it realized that it is truly an open source company and given the chance could be so successful, but it is probably too late. Of course realize that Vaughn-Nichols is an open source bigot who thinks open source is the answer to all things and that Microsoft is the anti-Christ incarnate.

All of the doom and gloom surrounding the recent bad news at Sun got me to thinking. When I was early in my tech career a Sun server running the latest version of Solaris was the baddest game in town. Yes, if you were doing media maybe a Silcon Graphics box was hotter but Sun owned the data center. Utlra Sparc's were our web server of choice in those days. The web was owned by Sun gear. Even though LInux was there, it was not as secure, stable or as scalable as Solaris. Sun seemed to have the world on a string and was even able to tweak Bill Gates nose. So where did it go wrong?

Some like Vaughn-Nichols will say Sun was too late in adopting open source like LInux and such. I say the opposite, I think Sun went wrong trying to be too much and too open to too many people. I think trying to make Solaris work on Intel as well as it did on Sun CPUs was a mistake. I think making Linux work on SPARC as well as Solaris was a mistake. Yes the platform was proprietary, but it rocked. Rolls Royce engines don't run in Chevys and Ford parts don't fit onto a Bentley.

When Sun tried to appeal to the every man, instead of being the Geeks hot rod, things started to unravel. I think their business at the high end was a sustainable model. No they were not going to over take Microsoft, but they would not be in the place they are today either.