Sun
At JavaOne
The
Good News
Let’s
start with the good news. JavaOne
was a successful conference – lots of happy attendees, lots of
exhibitors, lots of news. New
COO Jonathan Schwartz wanted to make sure there was plenty to talk
about and he guaranteed that with a combination of announcements
centering on new pricing models and open source releases of some Sun
properties, as well as new hardware announcements, and first
glimpses of Sun’s Project Kitty Hawk, a plan to redesign its
enterprise Java software to fit the SOA model.
(Note:
If you would like to know what Jonathan Schwartz is talking about
you’ll want to check into his new blog.
I don’t know if Jonathan is writing it himself, but it
sounds just like him. You’ll
find it at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040718.
)
Project Kitty Hawk
Project
Kitty Hawk is a Sun plan to update the Java Enterprise System suite
and its accompanying Java Studio tools to better support Service
Oriented Architectures (SOAs).
In the highly modular SOA environment, software modules are
written once and then reused in other applications, decreasing the
time and cost to create and maintain software.
Sun will offer an SOA Readiness Assessment program first,
intended to help companies determine their status and work out a
game plan. The software
itself will become available over the next two years.
Kitty
Hawk will:
- Use
the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to automate
business processes in a visual tool environment.
- Use
UML for application and process modeling.
Over
time, Kitty Hawk will integrate Java Enterprise System with its
middleware, with a first level of integration expected with Release
4 of JES next year.
Desktop News
Sun
has been part of the good news about desktop Linux and they will be
proud and happy to tell you how well they’ve done.
They can talk about their success on three levels:
-
The number of Sun Java Desktop Systems they’ve sold (at
$100 per employee per year – or $50 per employee to customers who
also buy the Sun Java Enterprise System software).
eWeek has tested Sun’s offering versus against Red Hat’s
Desktop entry and liked Sun’s JDS much better.
-
The number of copies of Sun StarOffice they sell,
-
The number of downloads of OpenOffice (the free open source
version of StarOffice) to date – now estimated (by Sun) at about
40 million.
All
of this adds up to the fact that Sun has been very successful at
giving away desktop software, but very little of it is paid for.
Even if you count every drop of it (and assumed all of the
free stuff was in use – unlikely – I have a dozen copies and I
bet you have some, too) it still adds up to a small fraction of the
total market. IDC
estimates that there were about 3.4 million Linux desktops in 2003
and that this might grow to 10 million by 2007. (By then IDC expects the total number of PDC users worldwide
to be about one billion.)
In
case you’re wondering how Sun can estimate 40 million
StarOffice/OpenOffice copies while IDC thinks there are less than 5
million Linux desktop users, there are things to consider:
-
StarOffice/OpenOffice
runs on other platforms, including Windows.
-
As
we’ve said, distribution doesn’t equal use.
-
On
the other hand, counting is tough and counting Linux desktops is
especially tough. IDC
and other research houses generally count operating systems by
counting the boxes they’re shipped on.
But Linux is generally installed onto a PC someone already
has, eluding the count. IDC
also counts paid copies of Linux, but keep in mind, there are more
copies of Linux downloaded for free than purchased with support and
free copies may be used freely – that is, nothing keeps the
downloader from putting them on a few machines – or a few hundred.
A Continuing Discussion Of Java, Sun,
and Open Source
Sun
has been trying to decide what to do about whether Java should be
open sourced for quite some time.
At JavaOne, serious discussions among multiple groups were
convened.
It
is Sun’s position (as best as it is possible for outsiders to
tell) that most customers don’t want to see Java put to Open
Source, because that would at once lessen Sun’s commitment to
enhance and support Java and increase the possibility of Java
forking. (You need to
remember that Jonathan Schwartz keeps insisting that Linux is
forked, although he won’t get much agreement to that statement
from the developer or the customer community.)
Sun believes that its Open Community Process which allows
comments and recommendations on the future development of Java, but
leaves decisions in the hands of Sun is the right idea.
There
has been lots of schoolyard shouting over this one. IBM has invited Sun to open source Java.
Sun has told IBM if it what to open source IP it should start
with its own products. (Would
it be in order to gently remind Sun how much of the current Java
code owes its life to work provided by IBM resources?)
On
the other hand, Jonathan Schwartz has been insisting since early
summer that Java will be put to Open Source – he just hasn’t
said which one. Since
there are 50+ possible licenses we’ll probably just have to wait
and see what Sun has in mind.
Perhaps
if Sun could “think outside the box,” it might be to
everyone’s best interest – Sun’s, its customers, and its
business partners. Perhaps Sun needs to figure out how to open source the code
itself while retaining some rights to the trademark (which is at
this point strongly tied to Sun), and perhaps owning a certification
process tied to the use of the name.
There must be at least a dozen other possibilities.
The trick is to keep in mind the goal:
more developers, more interest in the Java platform, less
need for Sun to shoulder the burden of supporting Java alone.
Here has to be a win/win answer to this problem.
We just have to think of the right incentive to get smart
minds focused on the solution.
Meanwhile (During JavaOne), Across The
Street, Apple Attracts Developers, Too
Sun
was not the only developer show in town.
Apple had conveniently decided to use the newest part of
Moscone Center, just down the street, for its own developer
conference. Developers
who favor both Apple’s OS X environment and Java could easily go
back and forth – and quite a few did.
The
next version of Apple’s operating system (Tiger) was previewed,
with SDK’s available to attendees.
The new version of the Apple OS (Mac OS X 10.4) includes:
-
Enhanced
video chat
-
Real-time
video
-
System-level
image manipulation
-
New
search capabilities (Searchlight will build folders which can update
their contents automatically in real time)
-
Improved
Windows compatibility and interoperability
-
A
new version of Safari (Apple’s web browser) which support RSS news
feeds
Tiger
will also be optimized for the new PowerPC-based G5 processor (from
IBM).
Apple
may remain a niche product, but it’s an elegant, innovative, and
well-loved niche.
Apple and Real . . . and Soon the Horde
More
recently, Apple has found itself in a tussle with Real Networks
which has decided to offer its web-based musical offerings from its
RealPlayer Music Store to Apple i-Pod users – among 70 other
devices including those from Creative, Rio, iRiver and others.
Since Apple wasn’t interested in Real as a partner, this
required some reverse engineering, which Apple is loudly protesting
as a DCMA violation. Real
claims it is simply in the tradition of providing independently
developed compatibility, much like Compaq made itself compatible to
the IBM PC.
Music
lovers (and IP observers) should note:
-
There
is no doubt going to be more, much more, to hear about this issue.
-
There
are lots more folks to hear from.
Microsoft, for instance, is getting ready to launch its own
MSN-based music store, which plans to be compatible with many
devices. We don’t
know if they care about being compatible with i-Pods, but in the
free-for-all world of the Internet, I’m sure the software that
lets you download songs from the MSN Music site to an i-Pod will
exist, authorized or not.
The
real problem here is that technology has enabled hundreds of
business models while entrepreneurs are often unable to consider any
but the one they had planned on.
If they wanted to sell devices and music as a system, it’s
hard for them to see the business model that makes either one on its
own a good, profitable business.
And if they’re the RIAA, they don’t understand that if
they don’t create a world in which the price of listening to music
is tied to convenience and new listening and buying patterns, new
musicians will pick new distribution partners and create an entirely
new music business.
Just
today, I read with interest and amusement that universities whose
many Macintosh using students plug their desktops into a university
LAN have figured out how to share their i-POD directories (and their
contents) across the net. An
unintended consequence of the powerful, easy-to-use networking
capabilities of Macintoshes – and a new way to find dates by
seeing who likes the same music you like!
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