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Upside: Sun’s War of Trenches

“When I accused Sun Microsystems of “not getting” the open
source movement, I did not anticipate the strong reactions I got.
My first column (“AOL, Sun Repeat History) on the topic inspired
tons of letters, mostly critical. My second column (“No, Sun
Doesn’t Get It) was followed by another huge influx of letters,
this time mostly supporting my view.”

“The most interesting response, however, was from Sun’s leading
technology guru, Bill Joy, a man who was instrumental in the
development of Unix as a commercial system. After considering the
views of some people who actually know what they are talking about,
including Joy’s, I have changed my opinion a bit. Sun does
“get” the open source movement. It is simply unwilling to embrace
it.

“The question is, why? Bill Joy believes that the GNU-Linux
approach is a bad business model (some letter writers agreed) and
that it does not serve the developer community well (nobody seemed
to agree with that one). Still others believe that Sun is as afraid
of that model as it is of Microsoft.”

Complete
Story

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