BBC Buys into Sun Spin on Open Source Software

Some technical editor at the BBC has been snookered three ways by Scott McNealy of Sun (JAVA) in this January 21 “news” story.  The open source blogoblatherers in European Union are multiplying the effect.

First, there’s the sentence in the article that says McNealy has been asked to “prepare a paper” by the Obama administration. Assuming the U.S. government works like the rest of the world (not necessarily true as U.S. taxpayers are well aware), being asked to “prepare a paper” is probably like saying “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

Second, the jist (or is it gist) of the BBC article is that, according to McNealy as quoted by the BBC:

“It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software. Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft (MSFT) or IBM (IBM) or Oracle (ORCL) or any proprietary vendor any money."

In fact that statement’s not at all obvious, nor is it even true (in multiple dimensions). There is no reason you should expect open source to be more cost effective since the open source concept relates to “free as in air, not free as in beer.” And since software is software, how can the way it is licensed make it “more productive.”

Third, it’s Scott McNealy promoting open source!!! He’s arguably the most proprietary guy in IT industry history since…. I dunno, maybe old Tom Watson. He's glommed onto open source to try to save Sun and its billions of lines of "proprietary software" from going down the tubes.

He’s backed in the BBC story by quotations from a Red Hat (RHAT) vice president.  See a trend here: Red Hat and Sun want to sell hardware, storage, software and services to the U.S. Federal government.

I hope they are successful. And I don’t have any concerns that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP (SAP) and other open source software suppliers larger and smaller than Sun and Red Hat don’t know how to play the game with the U.S. government too. (Actually some of the smaller suppliers of open source software might think things happen “before someone sells something.” But not the smart ones.)

But this article makes the BBC staff look like pretty naive

-- Dennis Byron

Comments

[Marten Mickos]

Dennis,

Thx for this article and other articles on open source!

I enjoy your writing (I don't agree with everything, but I enjoy it), but I'd like to comment on something you said in the above article: "And since software is software, how can the way it is licensed make it 'more productive'?"

Personally I believe that's exactly one of the benefits of open source. Even if we remove the other benefits of open source software, there is a very specific one in having the source code licensed in an open fashion: people can review the code, learn from it, fix it, expand on it, verify it, and so on. And they can do this without having to go through a cumbersome negotiation with a vendor. That's how they become *more productive*.

Ask Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and others. If these organizations had received the same code they now use but under a closed-source license, they would not have been as productive as they are today. To me that's evidence that the license indeed makes a big difference in productivity. Make sense?

Kind regards,

Marten

--
Marten Mickos, SVP, Database Group, Sun Microsystems