When I heard that Sun was planning to lay off 6,000, the first question that popped up in my head was - Does Sun even have 6,000 employees? (Actually 6000 is just 15% of their workforce.)
Sun is a company of extremes - they produce some of the most accessible and usable open source software in the world. But their hardware products are far from accessible and affordable for most small and mid-sized companies. Most of the startups I interact with (including my own) use Sun’s open source OpenOffice and also Java extensively. But sadly for Sun none of those startups uses Sun hardware.
So in many ways Java and OpenOffice seem to have a bigger brand than Sun itself (Of course, Sun admitted as much when they decided to change their stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA).
But Dana Blankenhorn asks a more important question - what will be the impact of Sun’s woes on open source ?
Dave Rosenberg is worried about Sun, a question discussed here last week.
“If it fails,” he writes, “Sun will be the harbinger of sorrow for the rest of the open source world.”
The open source business, yes. The open source world? Not so much.
Open source is a fact of life. Gartner Group estimates all large businesses will be deploying it within a year. Linux is extending its reach from the server to the client. Open source applications like Firefox are highly competitive.
On the other hand, the open source business model is not doing so well. It’s not bringing in the green. When given something for free and then asked to buy support, most customers say “thanks, but no thanks” especially when times get tough.
Open source is not all about the money | Open Source | ZDNet.com
I have a slightly different take on open source. I submit that there is an excess of software talent in the world - and that this talent cannot be soaked up by the corporate world. This “excess” talent manifests itself in the form of open source. Anecdotally I might even suggest that 30% of the developers that I have worked with are underemployed relative to their ability.
Writers write because they can’t help it - and developers code because they must. So while the open source business model will be cyclical along with the rest of the economy, the torrent of software will prove to be resilient.
And as for Sun - its days as an independent company might be coming to a close. And that will be a big loss to the open source world, because it is hard to imagine that any new owner of Sun will be as sympathetic and inspirational to open source as Sun was.