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Converting Sun
So why has Sun suddenly found the open source religion? A number of forces are at work. First, and most significant, Sun's management has seen Linux become the favored embedded OS for many turnkey products, and they don't like it. Sun has been longing to play in that market, and it's clear that many an entrepreneur values the open access and no-cost licensing of Linux over the supposedly superior support Sun claims for Solaris. SCSL doesn't address this issue completely, but it does provide relatively hassle-free access to Sun source code for purposes of research and development.

Beyond the obvious desire to expand the reach of Sun's hardware and software, Sun now understands that protecting the intellectual property embodied in software (and hardware design, for that matter) is not particularly important. That is to say that Sun customers aren't buying Sun products because of particular features found in a particular version of the company's software or hardware. Rather, Sun customers value the company's track record on continuous product support and improvement. It takes more than a few great algorithms to capture a niche in the software business. An aside: This wasn't always the case. For example, Novell essentially took the NOS market away from 3Com and Microsoft in the mid-80s by virtue of the superior coding behind NetWare (NetWare could service a user's file-read request with fewer than 100 machine instructions--probably at least an order of magnitude better than the competition, and that was very important when you were trying to service 100 concurrent users on a 16-MHz 386 server).

Do Not Pass Go
If access to source code is a primary goal and if protecting the intellectual property embodied in source code is no longer critical, why hasn't Sun gone directly to the open source model? Ultimately, if the folks at Sun want to do the right thing they'll adopt the open source model. But completely abandoning licensing as a revenue stream would take more guts than we should expect from any company. Basically, the assertion "We'll make more money if we give it away" is one best achieved with small steps--particularly if the one who utters the assertion wants to keep his or her job.

Sun's SCSL is no panacea. On the downside, it is being applied only to a limited set of the company's software products. Also, licensing fees are still required to sell a product that takes advantage of Sun code. And of course, there are still fees associated with the use of any Sun-owned brands and trademarks. These can be deal-breakers for some that would otherwise use Sun's software as the basis for their own products. Still, I think SCSL will be a successful experiment for Sun.

Given time to digest some success from these first steps, Sun could indeed be the first company to go from a proprietary licensing model to an open one. If it happens, the rest of the industry could begin to follow suit. And if that happens, the software industry will be significantly changed for the better.

Send your comments on this column to Art Wittmann at awittmann@nwc.com.