By Rachel Chalmers in Las Vegas
Sun Microsystems Inc’s Scott McNealy could hardly be described as gracious in victory. Still clearly thrilled about Judge Jackson’s findings of fact in the Microsoft antitrust trial, he made his hapless competitor the butt of his Comdex keynote. Anybody heard any good monopolist jokes? McNealy began. I’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks, I don’t know about you-all… Nor was Microsoft the only rival at which he took a swipe. HP’s Carly Fiorina came in for her share: We will not be doing any huge announcements, like changing our logo, said McNealy. I mean, Whoopee! The thrust of his argument was that the days of PC- centric computing are over. I don’t hate PCs, he said, to general amusement. I think they’re a great thing to keep people off the streets, off drugs. His main beef with the PC is what it has always been: that Windows machines are too difficult and expensive to administer and use. He compared the PC to the cell phone, citing figures which show that many home PCs are never used, and the rest are only switched on to access AOL.
Cell phones, on the other hand, are proliferating. McNealy believes that this is because telecommunications operates as a utility, where nobody but the service provider has to worry about the operating systems or applications. Information ought to be a utility, he insisted, there is no operating system industry, there is no applications industry. He noted that in Silicon Valley, where venture capital is flowing at the rate of $1.1bn per month, virtually none is earmarked for operating systems or applications. It’s all going into web-based services. Comdex should not exist, he observed, prompting more appreciative chuckles from the audience. He argued that real-time communications should be built into everything from light bulbs, which can order their own replacements, to passenger jets, which can report exactly what’s going on even as they dive into the Atlantic.
To prove his point, McNealy demonstrated the SunRay 1.0, Sun’s entrant in the nascent enterprise appliance market. It’s essentially a dumb terminal with smart-card authentication, connected to a powerful server able to render any user’s desktop. There are certainly advantages to this time-honored architecture. You can pull out your smart card in the middle of a video, plug it into another terminal and watch the end of the video. You can pull out the power cord while the video is playing, and the video will resume as soon as power is restored. This is what I have in my office, said McNealy. Sun is rolling out thousands internally: Workstations are so last year for mere mortals. He also demonstrated the StarPortal, which lets service providers offer Sun’s StarOffice as an online service, and General Motors’ Seville 2000, which he called a Java browser on wheels. The dashboard provides voice-activated net access, and the truly dedicated can use their Palm VII to sound the horn. In the future, McNealy believes, everything with electronic heartbeat will be part of a federated network of services, with not a Windows machine to be seen. The network is the appliance, if you like.
The enemy of Sun’s enemy is not, however, its friend. For months, Sun founder and loose cannon Bill Joy has been promoting Sun’s Community Source License (SCSL) as an alternative to the GNU General Public License (GPL). Where the GPL requires all alterations to GPLed code to be released into the public domain, the SCSL allows licensees to release binary-only derivations – for a price. Java and Jini are available under the SCSL. Some say that if they had been GPLed, Sun would not now be prosecuting Microsoft for breaching its Java Technology Licensing and Development Agreement (TLDA). McNealy, however, took up Joy’s cudgel. I’m sure there are some Linux developers here, and I know you guys don’t believe in property, he said. That’s fine; if you want to live in a commune, go ahead. But if you want to charge for things you’ve built with our technology – if you turn into a capitalist – we want to make a little money too. How fair can we be?
When the issue resurfaced in the Q&A that followed McNealy’s keynote, it became clear that Sun is attempting to strike an uneasy balance. Shareholders demand to know why the company gives away valuable technology like Java and Jini. Sun responds that its revenues will come from providing the powerful servers behind Java- and Jini-enabled appliances. Any money we make from the client is just gravy, McNealy said. So if the money isn’t important, why not release those technologies under the GPL rather than the SCSL? You can’t guarantee write once, run anywhere in that environment, he argued, noting that Sun has achieved this in Java with only one lawsuit. He maintained that even Linux is not available in as many form factors on as many platforms as Java. When the assembled journalists called him on this, citing Nokia’s new Linux-based device and a plethora of forthcoming embedded applications for the operating system, McNealy threw up his hands, chuckling. I can’t argue with you people, he concluded.
