The SUN is rising

One of my current favourite blogs is “The Open Road” by Matt Assay. A prolific commentator, well known in the Open Source industry and employed by Alfresco to boot (although the amount he writes on his blog I’m surprised he has time for much else).

Anyway, he recently did a series of interviews with many individuals that are at the heart of the Open Source phenomenon, from Red Hat, through Novell, IBM and many others. Amongst all of them Matt’s recent interview with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO Sun Microsystems) was absolutely fascinating and really did stand out from the crowd.

Jonathan is no ivory tower CEO – his own blog at Sun is a very good read and includes the now famous invitation to Linus Torvalds to come round for dinner: “I’ll cook, you bring the wine”. [I wonder if they ever did get together?]

The interview Matt presents here shows Jonathan Schwartz having the kind of insightful thinking and clarity of vision that make many other executives’ ramblings thoroughly insignificant. Matt concludes:

Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Sun is a contender again, and largely because of the vision and tenacity of Jonathan Schwartz.

And here’s a taster from Jonathan:

In a year where Sun arguably moved more aggressively to give away more free software than any other company, we grew our software business by 13%. It was the fastest-growing business at Sun (and doesn’t even include Solaris, which we don’t yet break out). We pumped out more software last year than we have in the history of the company. We gave it away. And yet our software business grew by 13%.

Read Matt’s article to find out why and how Sun is rising. If you are at all interested in Open Source and also how to make money from it, this is one of the most clearly articulated examples I have ever read. Nice one Matt. That’s a real gem.

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