This is the first post in a series of articles about open source, and more specifically, how Sun Microsystems is involved with the movement. This article will be a broad overview of how Sun views open source, how they contribute to the community, and how they integrate open source into their business model.
Sun Microsystems's commitment to open source starts at the top, with a director level position for open source held by Simon Phipps. Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer and Director at Sun and describes his job in a recent interview with FLOSS weekly as, “trying to make sure Sun does open source in a way that is legal, decent, honest, and truthful". He goes on to say that the reason Sun finds open source so important is a topological shift in society from hub and spoke, where the people at the top controlled everything flowing to consumers, citizens, and employees, to a mesh society, brought on by the internet. This has led to a change in business interests from secrecy giving confidence and security to transparency with privacy giving confidence and security.
The outcome of this shift is the open source movement, and the communities they create. “Open source is the synchronization of the self interests of many parties”, Phipps explains, creating an environment that allows for the sharing of code takes transparency, as well as privacy in terms of one’s motivation for being involved. Sun achieves this by building communities around their products, using a mix of paid engineers and free input from the community. This achieves both transparency, with everyone involved being able to see the same code, with all it’s features, innovations, and flaws, as well as privacy by members only seeing the contributed code, without the motivation behind it.
Some of Sun’s open source projects have paid engineers contributing to them, and can be seen as direct competition to some of Sun’s business rivals. OpenOffice for example is a free, open source, office suite that competes directly with Microsoft Office. OpenSolaris is a community driven free operating system that competes with Microsoft, Apple, and Linux. This aspect of open source is detailed in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, where companies are beginning to use open source as a way to undermine proprietary competitors. So how does Sun afford to pay engineers to contribute to projects that will ultimately be given away for free? By monetizing their products at the point where users find value, as opposed to monetizing the promise of value.
This can be done a number of different ways. Many open source projects make money by selling expertise on their product or selling a paid supported version. Paid support can grant access to 24/7 help desk support, updates, some kind of warranty, or help installing and configuring new systems. Sun builds these open source principles into their business model by offering both subscription-based versions of their products, as well as selling expertise with different services like installation or migration.
Sun Microsystems focus on open source, and community driven products has made them a leader in the open source movement. Sun has been able to benefit themselves, customers, and community member by allowing transparency with privacy, and charging only for what the end user finds valuable. This along with a shift to subscription and expertise based business model has helped them emerge as a leader in the high technology industry. Sun’s next move, and the subject of my next post, will be their push to open “the cloud”.
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