[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“The open-source community has been hearing reports that you
have recently said of Sun Microsystem’s strategy “The open-source
model is our friend”. We’re glad to hear that, and Sun’s support of
OpenOffice.org certainly puts some weight behind the claim. But
that support is curiously inconsistent, spotty in ways which
suggests that Sun is confused in the way it thinks about and
executes its open-source strategy.“That confusion is evident in another of your quotes. Many of us
think you are right on when you say that ‘Sun […] is less
threatened by a zero-revenue model for software than just about
anybody out there.’ We agree that the potential for you in using
open-source software as a value multiplier for Sun’s hardware
business is huge. This wouldn’t even be a novel move for Sun; your
release of the NFS standards in 1984 was possibly the single most
successful market-shaping maneuver in your company’s history, and
we’d love to help you repeat it…”