Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

[Posted May 15, 2007 by corbet]

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has some advice for Microsoft regarding its patent claims. "All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."

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Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 15, 2007 18:06 UTC (Tue) by joey (guest, #328) [Link] (10 responses)

Nice article, I only wish that the facts in it were a bit more believable. But there's not yet a fully GPLed java from Sun, and some other facts and figures in there seem to be read through strongly Sun-colored glasses.

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 15, 2007 18:09 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] (2 responses)

I suspect his words got passed through the Marketing wash and rinse cycle before being published... but I supposed that's not surprising.

Sun has been known to feed the occasional troll, though.

Posted May 16, 2007 5:50 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

Who joined Microsoft in bankrolling SCO? (and why didn't HP or any other Unix vendor see the need to "buy a SCOSource license"?)

Sun has been known to feed the occasional troll, though.

Posted May 17, 2007 4:21 UTC (Thu) by vmlinuz (guest, #24) [Link]

Well... I can't comment on the reported share deal mentioned in the article, but I can say for a fact, from personal experience, that the source code licensing was a genuine licensing of code which was then used in Solaris x86 development. It's important to remember, sometimes, that before Caldera bought most of SCO and became TSG, SCO was an honest software company, with some genuinely valuable code and technical expertise. We may not have been the biggest friends of Linux in those days, but as a company, our main focus was Unix-on-x86, so it was direct competition rather than the later nasty legal stuff.

Do you mean this figure?

Posted May 15, 2007 19:28 UTC (Tue) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link] (1 responses)

"Our contributions, from Java to OpenOffice to Gnome and Mozilla, now
account for in excess of 25% of all lines of code within your average
Linux distribution"

That just shows how bloated Java is ;)

(Sorry, I just had to)

Do you mean this figure?

Posted May 15, 2007 23:56 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Generally speaking, Linux distributions haven't included any Java code from Sun. This will change in the future, now that Sun has GPLed it.

Sun does deserve tons of credit for OpenOffice, and they've made important contributions to Gnome (especially for disabled people, and the assistive technology they donated has been picked up by KDE as well). But 25% seems a bit high.

It might be an interesting project to do a contributor line count for a whole distribution, like LWN did for the Linux kernel.

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 16, 2007 14:33 UTC (Wed) by Tao (guest, #24985) [Link] (4 responses)

Why do I feel comments from lwn.net have always been through a Anti-Sun glasses? Look at the comments here so far ... they're not fair, off-topic, and sometimes pure non-sense.

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 16, 2007 17:17 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

So what if they gave SCO $13 million? Dude, they blog! They must be all cool and stuff!

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 16, 2007 17:48 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Well, there was the "bloated Java" joke (which I thought that was funny even though obviously incorrect given the tiny amount of Java in most Linux distros). Other than that, what comment could be seen as unfair? I'm genuinely interested.

Don't worry about offtopic or nonsense replies. That happens to every story. :)

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 18, 2007 14:46 UTC (Fri) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link] (1 responses)

Why do I feel comments from lwn.net have always been through a Anti-Sun glasses? Look at the comments here so far ... they're not fair, off-topic, and sometimes pure non-sense.

Are you familiar with the U.S. Civil War? That was a family spat.

Microsoft is mostly irrelevant, so far as advancing free software is concerned. They are a (relatively) temporary hindrance to computing. It is sport to point out their consistent misrepresentations and incompetence. No one really expects them to see the error of their ways, though.

That is not the case with Sun. Sun has been historically significant in scientific advances of computing. They went through a schizophrenic stage and appear to be coming to their senses. As long-term members of the family of free software, they must endure repeated backlashes for their discrepencies while acting as the 'black sheep'. Many free software developers cut their teeth on Sun systems. GNU tools were routinely installed there and used for development before Linux was created. "The network is the computer" was coined in 1984. Do a 'grep' on any GNU/Linux or Unix system and you'll find Sun there.

Instead of seeing "Anti-Sun", try viewing the criticisms as reproofs for behavior beneath the standard expected. Sun should know better. They're not hopeless like Microsoft.

Schwartz: Free advice for the litigious

Posted May 20, 2007 22:03 UTC (Sun) by dwkunkel (guest, #5999) [Link]

Sun has seriously poisoned the well as far as I'm concerned. Overpriced, arrogant, and slow are three things that I equate with Sun and their products. I would like to have my opinion changed by their actions, but it hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile, in our business unit we have replaced ALL the Sun boxes in our development labs with Linux. The corporate data center has gone from about 80% Solaris a few years ago to 68% Linux now.