Scrounging For Sun's Next Suitor (If There Is One)

You say Java, I say Solaris -- eh, let's call the whole thing off. So much for Java (or OpSol, or even OpenOffice) becoming an IBM brand. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea: where else are you going to find a second home for all that where the people "get" open source -- and there are other business models apart from hoping really hard that everyone comes around to your way of thinking?

I have the suspicion that at least one of the driving pressures to open-source both Solaris and Java has been the incipient possibility of a sale. It might sound a bit backwards at first: why open source something that's one of your biggest assets? But I've mentioned before (as was the case with Sun's own acquisition of MySQL), the purchase isn't strictly about the software in Sun's portfolio, but the experts who created it. They're smart guys, and they deserve the backing of a company that allows them to develop good work and release it to the world as they see fit. IBM would have been a great place for them. (Comments about culture clashes along the lines of "laid-back Sun vs. buttoned-down IBM" are probably far from the mark: for a while now, IBM's been a lot less straightlaced than people remember.)

So who else might step up? Cisco, who probably won't be able to stump up nearly the price IBM was offering -- and who seem a lot less capable of offering the kind of environment where the creators of the above technologies can thrive. They're network people, but Sun's whole business about the computer being the network has stopped being revolutionary and is just now the way things get done -- so I'm not convinced they're the way forward for Sun.

The bad news, as I see it, is that if there isn't another suitor after this, Sun may find itself spiraling into space, with all of its best work falling hither and thither. Matt Asay's said "the open source world doesn't care much for corporate positioning", but given that most of the best open source is produced and cultivated with heavy-duty corporate backing, that's a blinkered way to look at it.

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