“GM: What was the state of the open-source activity at Sun when
you joined?“SP: I regard Sun as the original open-source startup company.
It’s the first long-lived company I can think of that used open
source as the basis of a business model. If you look back down
Sun’s history, through the decades, you see that Sun kept on
working openly with communities around software and hardware. It
did it with NFS, it did with TCP/IP, it did with Java, and it’s
continuing to do it now with OpenSolaris and the rest of the
portfolio. So, in one sense, there was always and there remains a
very, very strong open software ethos at Sun…”