Ten minutes with Jonathan Schwartz

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SCHWARTZ: Storage was nicknamed ‘snore-age’ since it was such a boring area but now it’s fantastically interesting.

ACN sat down with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems to talk about all things open-source and what was next on the radar for the solar-themed company.

What is Sun doing to drive open source in developing markets?

The good news about developing markets is that for the most part, open source appeals to those that are driving change and are investing in infrastructure. In a way, open source in developing markets is a far simpler message to send than in more mature markets.

What educational outreach programs do you have planned for open source?

Open source is fundamentally a community activity, which implies a level of self-sustenance. This isn't Sun advertising in educational magazines, this is computer science departments and engineering groups across the world, that are naturally connected to the internet, and form somewhat natural technical communities.

Your blog has featured a ‘pink dot' map of the globe with a pink dot representing each opt-in registration instance of Solaris 10 and Open Solaris. The Middle East doesn't show a lot of pink dots - are there geographic areas where open source needs more of a helping hand?

I think there are some economies in the world that may not have felt any degree of economic sensitivity. If you are producing $100 million of wealth every day, you might not be concerned about the capacity to save on your next database purchase.

But if you look at China and India in the pink dot map, you won't see that many dots by comparison to Western Europe, but that is partially because we don't reflect the copies that are distributed once they are downloaded. If you are in areas where bandwidth is precious, you will see that once a download is done, a CD is printed from that and the CDs are spread across the world.

Is there a danger that by trying to make money from open source, that Sun might face a backlash from the user and developer community?

I doubt it. There are certainly fringe elements of any community that don't believe in commercial software, but that's somewhat of a radical fringe. For the vast majority of the open source community, what they care about is getting access to the technology. What we offer, and we are a for-profit corporation, is the quid pro quo. What we expect in return is that you can do with it as you see fit, and we then expect you to contribute back the extensions and changes you have made.

What sort of role does Sun have in engaging with governments on open source policy, particularly driving open source in the education sector?

We can and will certainly try to play a role. For the most part, areas that have a focus on computer science and computer engineering tend to be interested in open source for a very basic reason - the curriculum is much, much broader than it would be from simply studying Microsoft Windows.

That sends a lot of universities our way, because they understand what they want, and what they want is technology that is open that gives them access to open markets. In addition, the Java language is still the most instructed language on Earth, it just so happens it is also open source. What most universities are really focused on is not only giving their students the best training possible, but also giving them the preparation for participation in the global market.

After acquiring MySQL, are there other acquisitions that Sun wants to make in open source or related IP?

First and foremost what we are doing now is in the world of storage. A few years ago storage was nicknamed snore-age, because it was such a boring area, but it has become fantastically interesting, in part because of the developments that the consumer electronics companies have driven around flash memory. Next on the landscape is the convergence of networking, storage and servers and how they are all being built from the same parts. So the next market that we will be examining is the networking marketplace.

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