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The Dead Star Blues

Open most any tech-related publication and headlines smack you in the face about the imminent demise of Sun. Or the reasons why Sun has failed. Or what could be done to save Sun. In short, it's what most decently clued-in people have been talking about for years now. So why not just let Sun die?

It's a tempting proposition, especially since all of Sun's most important technology is now available under open source licenses of one kind or another. If Sun dies off, all of their best and brightest innovations -- Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, you name it -- will go on to find other and maybe even better patrons. Leave the dying to die, and move on to better things.

Well, maybe not.

What worries me is not Sun as a company, but Sun as a place where bunches of people are working together to make these things. If Sun itself vanishes, the engineering teams and programming crews that Sun put together are also destroyed, and may not be easily recreated. They're at least as important as any one product that Sun has created, and they cannot be replaced by simply shuffling around deck chairs.

I've mentioned this before, many times, but I want to hit on it as hard as I can right now. If buying Sun outright isn't a possibility, then perhaps other people can explicitly create the kinds of environments that will be natural extensions of Sun's existing teams. Keep the people, but scrape off the label and the serial numbers. (Obviously they won't be able to take anything with them that's Sun property.)

Sun's mistake was not that they went open source, but that they came into the game way too late; they should have started doing what they're doing now a decade ago or more. There's no way they can get caught up this fast. The only way forward I see for them is a graceful exit strategy that lets the people who did the real work go forth and multiply, so to speak.

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