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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Drinking the kool-aid
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No question about it, this one belongs to you. IT customers were the driving force, the ultimate bottom line, the wake-up-to-reality call behind the historic Sun-Microsoft accord announced the morning of April 2
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Uh, no MaryFran - customers had less than nothing to do with this deal. It hinged on a number of things, one of which she touches on later in the editorial:
Sun's increasingly weak and desperate position in the marketplace
MS' desire to get rid of a distracting lawsuit
Both companies desire to hurt the IBM/Linux push
That last one is something both companies agree on - and from the look of it, they agree on this more than they dislike each other. This is touched on later in the editorial:
Both companies are worried about the rise of Linux and the ever-present threat of IBM's enterprise dominance. Sun has suffered through years of financial setbacks and faces yet another quarterly loss and an upcoming layoff of 3,300 employees. Microsoft has spent tens of millions of dollars in courtroom battles over antitrust issues, and its stinging defeat last month by the European Commission moved its legal troubles as a monopolist onto the world stage
Funny that she puts that in the penultimate paragraph of the editorial - it's the key point of the deal - and the only reason it's happening. MS wanted to get rid of the suit, and Sun is weak - but neither was enough to drive this deal. What drove it was those two things combined with their joint belief that IBM and Linux are the bigger threat. The key thing to watch over the next few months is just how much Sun starts downplaying/cutting all the desktop initiatives they have been pushing - and how far they start distancing themselves from open source. This post from James Gosling could be considered an "opening salvo" in that positioning:
GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java platform is "free" in many senses: you don't have to pay anything for the runtime or developers kit and you can get the sources for everything. Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code. But the sources for the JDK do come with a license that has a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing.
Don't get too caught up in the "it's all because of what customers have been telling us hype - this is all about the three points I mentioned earlier. Sure, there's potential customer benefit here, but that's a secondary concern at best
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