“While Sun president and COO Edward Zander declared at
Comdex today that we’re at the “tip of the iceberg” of the Internet
revolution, outsiders say Sun’s ability to give Internet technology
a push depends on its willingness to work with other players by
plugging its critical infrastructure apps into an open standards
space. Zander stressed that all of Sun’s products and services
are in fact based on open standards — “based on” being the key
phrase, as even open source Forte Community Edition, Sun’s new Java
development environment, will be rolled into proprietary enterprise
versions.”
“The validity of the Sun’s recent moves here was questioned more
than once throughout the halls of the Linux Business Expo, whose
attendees expressed disappointment that Sun backed Java out of the
international standardization group, ECMA. The move had been a blow
to many open sourcers who believe that Sun has opted consistently
to keep the Java code — the veritable glue to the ecommerce sites
— out of the hands of builders who don’t want to pay the licensing
fee to use Java for commercial products.”
“Though open standards may not make the key strategy list, Sun
isn’t totally devoid of friends in the Linux space. Sun’s most
recent general open source license, the Java Community License, has
received praise from open evangelists like Collab.net’s Brian
Behlendorf, and Sun has successfully established relationships with
Linux companies like Linuxcare.”