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"He's the CEO president, but it's kinda like he's the CEO of Enron and WorldCom."
- Jim Cramer on The Colbert Report10/20/2005

Once again, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz delivers a worrisome explanation of Sun's muddled strategy. If you're in a hurry, skip to the part around the headline that says 'Free Markets' and read the paragraph before and after that headline. He completely botches the comparison of Sun's no-license-just-support-contract approach with more familiar consumer products.

Credit cards are not free. Mobile phones are not free. Amazon and eBay are not free. In each case you have to pay to use them; you can choose not to use them and avoid paying, except in the case of a "free" mobile phone which usually is subsidized by a contract you can't just walk away from without paying.

By that same definition, cars and houses are also free, so long as you can finance them without a down payment. Amazon and eBay will let you browse for free, but that's hardly a groundbreaking new business model; bricks-and-mortar merchants have allowed that for thousands of years. When there is no transaction happening, nobody makes money. For Amazon, eBay, or a credit card company, that's being out of business. For Sun, we are to believe that's the grand strategy?

The remaining businesses he mentions are ad-funded web sites. I haven't installed OpenSolaris; I don't believe it is ad-supported. OpenOffice and MySQL definitely are not.

I get what he's trying to say: that Sun's free offerings are a prerequisite that customers must first acquire before buying anything from Sun. But the problem is that, well, they aren't. The things Sun is giving away are not tied to a mandatory monetization, whereas all of the "free" things he previously mentioned are. There is no free "lite" version of Amazon or eBay or a mobile phone that you can use to get free books, auction items, or mobile calls if you don't want to get the deluxe for-money plan.

This is a really important distinction to make. Schwartz is trying to say that OpenSolaris, MySQL, OpenOffice, and their other free offerings are like the free slab of plastic that makes merchant fees and finance charges happen for credit card companies, or the web site that Amazon has to run so that you will buy books. But they just aren't. You don't download MySQL in order to give Sun a means to sell you support. But in all the cases he mentions, the free thing is useless except that it lets you spend money with it. Even in the cases (eBay, credit cards, PayPal) where you are intending to transact with a third party, the money goes through them and they take a cut. Again the free thing is interesting to you only in that it allows you to transact financially with the third party. The free thing is useless except that you use it to spend money.

Contrast this with MySQL. Do you know anyone who has ever paid for MySQL? The same is true for Java: have you paid to install a Java runtime or JDK lately?

As a software developer who loves open-source software, I'd like to see Sun figure out a business model that makes this work. But it's pretty clear that either Schwartz doesn't understand the business models of the companies he's trying to emulate, or hopes that his audience is easily confused by the comparison.

"...anyone wanting to use this in production will be required to duct tape their entire chest and have a team of oxen rip off the tape without screaming to prove steelyness of spirit..." (from the backgroundjob readme)

Interesting: Interview with an Adware Author; The real cause of the financial crisis - An MIT Blackjack Team perspective.

Cool: A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue.

Funny: Digital Performance Eyewear

In The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL), Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs about how Microsoft paid them to bundle software with the Java runtime. He mentions that "just last month, we distributed more than 60,000,000 Java runtimes". According to Sourceforge, over 500,000 downloads per day are of the Azureus filesharing client, which is a Java application. This is currently the most popular project on Sourceforge, and the #2 project of all time. So as many as 15 million of those 60 million Java runtimes that Microsoft is helping to fund may be downloaded specifically to share files. I doubt this is something Mirosoft was intending when they decided to do this.

Headache? You Skipped Your Coffee. No kidding. I was ingesting over 500mg of caffeine per day (six double lattes or six cans of Red Bull = 480mg) and had unpredictable splitting headaches and nausea as side effects. I quit in early December and haven't had caffeine since. I'll probably start again with much more controlled amounts but so far it's nice not to feel awful all the time.

Funny: 86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins, Job Recruiters Instructed To Avoid WoW Players, Keepers of the Pips Threw a Wobbly, ReiserFS has key features lacking in other filesystems (see the rightmost column for details).

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