SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems seems ready to allow its
pricey Solaris server line to become open sourced, as it looks to mobile
applications to fuel demand for its infrastructure products.
At JavaOne, Sun’s developer conference held Monday through Thursday in San
Francisco, President and COO Jonathan Schwartz said that billions of mobile and
embedded devices — in everything from phones to cars — would create an
accelerating market that will eventually make money for investors, software
developers and Sun.
Just as cellular telephone companies give phones away to consumers in order
to make money on basic connectivity and, increasingly, on paid content and
applications, such as games and ringtones, Schwartz said, “We’re investing
in Java not so we can make a fortune in handsets, but to get Java handsets
to consumers who put demands on the network that, in turn, demand high-scale
infrastructure, supplied by Sun customers.”
Sun may change its own product and pricing strategy to be more like the
carriers. Schwartz said the company is moving toward the “razor and razor
blades” model, where the initial investment is kept low so, and recurring
revenue comes from refills of blades.
“You have to divorce yourself from the idea that you make money on the
thing you deliver on day one,” he said.
“What matters is the totality of the market opportunity in the future.”
Sun will continue to sell software under the traditional model, in addition to
selling it on an on-demand and per-seat basis, as well as combining the models.
Roland Busch, CEO of the Infotainment Solutions division of Siemens VDO Automotive AG,
demonstrated an entertainment and information service in a BMW that included
navigation help and the ability to control the interior climate.
Schwartz noted that cell phones, telematics devices, toys,
appliances, handheld devices and set-top boxes all use the same infrastructure.
He pegged the total market opportunity for Java applications and infrastructure
at $100 billion a year.
“To grow the market, Java has to be faster still — and easier,”
he told the developers. “And the technology itself has to become more
accessible to the legions of the world’s developers who aren’t object-oriented
coders.”
To that end, the company released Sun Java Studio Creator, a visual
development tool that generates compatible Java code. The drag-and-drop
authoring tool is aimed at corporate developers new to Java, and Schwartz
said it was an attempt to woo them away from Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET.
Access to Creator requires a $99 per year subscription to the Sun Java Developer
Network, a new Web site that includes tools, tutorials and forums.
Schwartz confirmed that Sun plans to
open-source
its next-generation desktop software, Project Looking Glass, along with its
Java 3D application program interface
graphical desktop suite, an answer to the Windows and Macintosh desktops, which
adds the ability to arrange application windows in three-dimensional space.
The platform runs on Solaris and Linux and features window transparency,
rotation, zoom and miniaturization.
However, in a question and answer session with journalists and analysts,
Schwartz raised doubt about just what kind of a license Sun might choose.
“Just as there is no one hammer for all nails, there are many open source
licenses,” Schwartz said. “Different licenses have different outcomes in the
market. One thing we’re committed to is ensuring compatibility.”
Sun has been
criticized for the Java community license, because it requires developers to
pay a hefty fee to have their applications certified. The company has
responded
that it wants to avoid having applications in the marketplace that don’t follow
the mantra of working on all machines.
“Leaders are frustrated by standards,” Schwartz said, because they make it
easier for other companies to compete against them. “Laggards like them,”
he said, “because it’s an occasion to catch up.”
In related news, Sun and Agilent Technologies announced
they had created the Java Distributed Data Acquisition and Control
java.net community, an open-source forum that supports the development of Java applications
and libraries for wide-area distributed sensors and controls.
The technology can be used for controlling machinery, building automation,
security, utilities management, robotics, mobile communications and distributed
sensor and control networks, such as those used by utility companies. Agilent
Laboratories is researching distributed wide-area sensor networks using IEEE
standards for wireless networking.
