BusinessWeek: Doing It Wrong, Getting It Right

“In the late 1990s, while working as a sales engineer at Sun
Microsystems, I decided that I wanted to do something more
technical, more on the programming side of things. I was interested
in developing an application server, a program that manages the
applications for an enterprise, using Java, a Sun programming
language with which I was familiar. Open Source, whereby a
developer licenses the code to users at no cost, was just coming
into its own at the time. Users could run the program, and access
the source code or even modify it, at no charge.

“Given the business climate at that time, I felt that there was
a good likelihood of finding venture capitalists to fund the
project. In other words, once I firmed up the product, I could stay
focused on the product while the suits could figure out how to make
money and build a real company around it…”

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