With Java turning 10, Sun said that in many ways, the market and atmosphere has changed. Java on embedded devices is now surpassing PCs, and it is now taking a mellower attitude with once and current rivals.
At the tenth annual JavaOne Developer Conference in San Francisco, Sun announced two products it had made open source, the Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 and Java System Enterprise Server Bus. A couple of weeks ago the Californian company released its Solaris operating system as an open-source app.
This is just the beginning of Sun’s free software strategy.
We will keep opening that stack, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun’s software group. Our intent is the entire stack will be [open-source] over time.
Loiacono gave no roadmap or timetable to Sun’s open-source rollout.
In the past, Sun has not had an effective, mutual embrace with the free and open-source, or FOSS, community, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun president and COO, told the crowd of about 10,000 developers.
Until now, Sun has its sights firmly set on tapping into the free-software market. Free, that is, but not necessarily open source.
As far as I’m concerned, most of the world — and I’m sure it will come to no shock to most of you — can’t code, Schwartz said. So the free part is what we’ve been focused on.
He cited some of the most popular software as being freely available, including Linux, Apache and Eclipse.
In response to critics’ questions on why hasn’t Sun done more before now to make its Java-based applications freely available, chief executive Scott McNealy later defended his company’s position. Sun was the No. 1, far and away company that donated its software to the open-source community, McNealy said. Who has donated as much open-source than us?
We’re not the company somebody ought to say, ‘When are you going to do more?’, McNealy said. We look like a well that could be tapped, I suppose.
Sun has a long way to go before its Java stack is freely available. After all, it took nearly as long to develop (five years) and cost nearly as much to develop Solaris as it did to ensure the operating system was safe to be freely available, Schwartz said.
Which begs the question, How will Sun make money by making its Java-based apps free?
Unlike rivals IBM and BEA, Sun’s Java products never had the market share that could have produced revenue streams for Sun from its own invention. Now that Sun is making Java freer than ever, the question of when it will make money from Java is even more pointed. Sun’s response is to borrow a concept of loss leader from the commercial world.
Schwartz pointed out that banks don’t make money from free checking. What open source and free software is all about is not revenue, it’s about barriers to revenue, Schwartz said. No large customer will deploy free software in a mission-critical application with no support contract.
McNealy said if the company doesn’t go open source and create a large community, it doesn’t have a chance to compete against Microsoft. We’d rather have a chance of winning in an open world than having no chance of winning when Microsoft wins, McNealy said.
While Sun has yet to prove this strategy, the popularity of Java is growing, with 42% more Java-enabled devices worldwide than at last years’ conference, according to Sun.
And most of that growth is coming outside computing platforms. In Java’s tenth year of existence, the number of Java-enabled mobile phones exceeded Java-enabled personal computers, and that doesn’t even count the number of other kinds of embedded devices.
Of 2.5 billion Java devices worldwide, 708 million were phones versus 700 million PCs, according to Sun. Loiacono said he expects this trend to continue.
Indeed, Yasushi Nishimura, director of Panasonic R&D of America announced at the conference that Panasonic would adopt Java for its Blu-ray DVD players. He demonstrated a prototype player that used Java to control graphics and on-screen menu bars on a DVD.
Nishimura also said the standards-setting Blu-ray Disc Association would adopt Java for the interactivity standards of the Blu-ray optical disc format.
We believe the next big market for Java will be the digital AV world, Schwartz said.
McNealy later said that ten years ago, Sun underplayed Java big time. We didn’t realize it would make every DVD player a usable PC connected to the network. And with that, Sun trotted out several household brand names that are committing to Java on their devices.
In a pre-recorded video clip, boomed from a giant screen on stage, Takeshi Natsuno, senior vice president of NTT DoCoMo’s multimedia services said his company plans to broaden its relationship with Sun to better its Java-based technology. Java so far had contributed to 60% of DoCoMo’s $10bn earnings, he said.
Sun also trotted out Research in Motion VP of engineering David Yach on stage to talk about Java and BlackBerry devices, which uses a few million lines of Java code to run.
Meanwhile, with Java turning 10, Sun showed that it is now busily extending the olive branch. Becoming friendlier with Microsoft Corp., the one-time nemesis was now officially part of the conference as exhibitor and presenter of several JavaOne’s technical sessions on interoperability.
Sun also announced IBM had renewed its Java license for another 10 years. The deal with IBM, which had no preconditions, took about a year to strike, Loiacono said. There probably was no more debate today than there was 10 years ago, he said.
Sun needs to build bridges with its rivals, given the recent consolidation in the computer industry, McNealy said. We have to work with everybody. [Now] we have no more enemies we can do a deal with, he quipped.
Schwartz said the biggest competitive threat to open-sourced Sun Java applications remained Microsoft and its .NET language.
