Interview: Bechtolsheim hails open-source moves
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(InfoWorld) - Andreas, or simply, Andy, Bechtolsheim holds the distinction of having employee badge #1 among the thousands of people who have worked at Sun Microsystems in its 25 years of existence. Perhaps best known as the inventor of the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, he is among the four founders of the company, along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Although he left the company in 1995 to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup, he returned to Sun in 2004 via the company's Kealia acquisition. Bechtolsheim also was a vice president at Cisco Systems while away from Sun. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Bechtolsheim about Sun's past and present situation, with Bechtolsheim chiming in on about topics including open source and the Intel and SPARC chip architectures. [See also a Slideshow: "25 years of Sun" | PDF: "Timeline of Sun's achievements"] InfoWorld: First of all, was Bill Joy actually the fourth employee at Sun? Or wasn't he more like the 15th or 16th employee? Bechtolsheim: I think his official badge number was 6 because there were two people we hired on day one, and he came [onboard approximately] the next week. But he was considered a founder. InfoWorld: And you wore badge number 1, right? Bechtolsheim: Well, that's because I worked on the workstation for three years before the company started, although I think Bill worked on Berkeley Unix longer than that. So maybe he should have been number 1. The way the company started was I had a previous business that was actually licensing the design [of] the Sun workstation to other companies in exchange for royalties. And I had a whole bunch of people set up making these boards. It dazzles me that none of these companies had any clue about the workstation business. They had all the pieces, but they didn't see the market opportunity, and I was kind of getting frustrated because I was really more the engineer, the hardware guy, than the businessman. So Khosla called me saying, "Let's just start a company. This was the obvious solution to the problem of how to bring this product to market. InfoWorld: I know you've left Sun, you've come back, and I think there's been a couple exits and returns.Â  Bechtolsheim: No, no, no, there was just one. I left in 1995 to start a Gigabit Ethernet company called Granite, which Cisco acquired in 1996, and then I spent seven years at Cisco until the end of 2003. And then I left Cisco to start a company, which Sun acquired in 2004. InfoWorld: What are you doing these days? Bechtolsheim: Well, my official title here is chief architect of industry standard [products] and I'm basically responsible for the product definition of our industry-standard architectures [offerings]. InfoWorld: How do you view Sun after 25 years? The company has had its ups and downs, mostly ups except for the last few years. How do you view the company at this point and where do you think it's headed? Bechtolsheim: One reason I left in 1995 is that one of my concerns at the time was that we should be really building an x86-based server, and I was getting worried that the cost performance of those systems was edging up with the SPARC architecture. Here I am 10 years later or 12 years later actually doing what I suggested the company should be doing earlier.... People keep asking was this like a prearranged marriage? But the honest truth was I had no idea I would be coming back to Sun. I was actually happy building this [sort of] little business, but when Sun decided to enter the industry-standard market, it became an opportunity to build a much more significant business here. So that's why I'm back here. InfoWorld: Were you the founder of the SPARC architecture? Bechtolsheim: What happened is Bill, even though he was really the software guy, became convinced in, I think it was 1984, that Motorola and the whole microprocessor architecture they were using, which was the 68000, was just not keeping up, or not taking advantage of what the technology could do. And after some interesting investigations, we concluded that we might as well design our own architecture, which was, for a small startup company, quite the bold thing to do. What was correct about this was it gave us a performance lead for many, many years, and then [we grew] the company to many, many billion dollars. So it was actually a very successful decision. Now, I was not involved in the original SPARC chip design. However, I was involved in the design of SPARCstation 1, which was really the first high-volume product around SPARC, which was a pizza-box workstation that was launched in 1989. And that was actually Sun's best-selling product for a while, and that was followed by the SPARCstation 2 and 10 and 20. And then I guess I got a little tired of doing all these workstations, so I decided there was a new opportunity in gigabit networking. But now I do see an opportunity back in the server space, and that's why I'm back here. InfoWorld: Do you think SPARC has much of a future at this point? Bechtolsheim: Well, it's the mainstream of the company. In fact, it's growing again. And the price performance and power efficiency of these multithreaded architectures is quite compelling. Now, having said that, it is Solaris-only, so it defines the Solaris market, whereas the industry-standard architecture of course runs Linux as well as Windows. From a volume perspective, the industry's architecture is way ahead. But we have a number of very loyal SPARC customers, and we don't see a reason to switch anytime soon, so we will keep investing in SPARC as long as that makes sense. InfoWorld: Would you say that Sun has righted the ship? I remember quarter after quarter after quarter where Sun was just getting bigger and bigger. And then during dot.com bust, Sun, like everybody else, slipped. Would you say that you righted the ship with the open-sourcing of Solaris and Java and that sort of thing? And also, what is your take on the open-sourcing of Java? I don't know if you ever actually publicly stated it. Bechtolsheim: I wasn't at Sun when the crash happened. From the outsider's view, Sun probably reacted a little too slowly to the change in business fundamentally. So the company would have been better off at the time to downsize more quickly. But that was six years ago, so that's neither here nor there. The open-sourcing of Solaris is actually going very well. There have been over 5 million downloads to date. We don't actually know what people are doing with all these downloads. It's kind of fascinating to see people in Pakistan and India and China and all over the world downloading this code, and something interesting is about to happen here, I would think, and the same about Java of course. So perhaps the company should have opened up these systems sooner, but nobody's complaining about the fact that it's open now. And it certainly has received very positive feedback from developers and other people who want to make either extensions or just understand how this stuff is working. InfoWorld: When you say positive feedback from developers, you're talking about Solaris and Java, or just Solaris? Bechtolsheim: Well, I want to touch on the Solaris side. Java, of course, runs on all kinds of platforms, such as Solaris. But I'm not with the part of the company that's working on all the Java things, so I can't really speak to that.... Open-source software has a compelling advantage because the potential customers know that there's a difference in openness with open software than with any kind of closed software. And more and more governments and companies decide that that's the right thing to do. InfoWorld: So you're in favor of the open-sourcing of Java? Bechtolsheim: That was definitely the right thing to do.... Keep in mind that when Sun started, Berkeley Unix was essentially the first open-source operating system because you would get a copy of the source code just by sending a $100 check to Berkeley, which covered the cost of making a tape and sending it to you, right? In some sense, we should have kept that tradition all along, so the fact that Solaris was not always as open as it is today was basically a sort of mistake.Â  InfoWorld: So can Sun still make money selling hardware and services even though the software is now basically free in many instances? Bechtolsheim: It's no different than Linux, right? Even though Linux itself is free, there's a cost for support and so on, and Solaris support actually, as far as that, is less expensive than a Red Hat subscription. So we are in fact competing with the Linux model. InfoWorld: What are you most proud of in the 25 years of Sun, and what is your biggest disappointment? Bechtolsheim: [There are] all the good memories certainly [of] the early days with the first Sun workstation, the first SPARCstation, UltraSPARC, and so on. All of these were major milestones that really propelled the company forward. And my personal involvement was by far the greatest with the SPARCstation series of products. Actually, really all the workstation products, but the SPARCstation really broke new grounds for the company in terms of just being a high-volume platform. One of the disappointments was that we didn't take advantage of the x86 architecture earlier. We should have done that in the 1990s certainly, not just a few years ago. But by the same token, there's ongoing innovation here, and it's not too late to re-enter that market. InfoWorld: I keep thinking back to something like Open Look versus Motif. Do you think Sun has been a rebel sort of company?Â  Bechtolsheim: No, I think that's the wrong way to look at it. If you want to innovate, you sometimes have to throw things out and see whether you can make them successful. Because there's no easy way in advance to predict how exactly it will play out. Open Look is an example where something was not successful, even though we tried, we tried to give it away to the industry, but at the time, there was this counterforce called the Open Software Foundation, which was really the IBM, HP, DEC club to prevent Sun from growing, and whatever [we] were doing, they would oppose and do it differently. Now the Open Software Foundation, of course, wasn't successful either. There's nothing that remains from that. But the unfortunate thing is that what we were telling these other companies at the time was that the problem was Microsoft, not Sun, and they just didn't believe it. And a few years later that was more evident, but a lot of energy was wasted during that period of Unix companies trying to slow each other down, which really wasn't beneficial to anyone. But again, this was an industry matter of fact that we could just observe that not everybody understood open systems at the time, but I think it's clear now.
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Chief Executive Bruce Chizen discusses open source, the importance of video, and increasing competition from the likes of Google.
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Programmers say the new version of the open-source database is 5 to 30 percent faster and works better on Windows.
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Open-source software maker releases big update to Java-based application server program.
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Blog: The open-source packaged application company, which is releasing the beta of a major product upgrade, is on track to go public, says CEO.
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Three open-source software firms announced investments today: $27 million for Greenplum, $11 million for Zenoss, and $9 million for Alfresco.
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The software company has undergone an extreme makeover.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? InfoWorld went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found. [See also a Slideshow: "25 years of Sun" | PDF: "Timeline of Sun's achievements"] Andy Bechtolsheim: An eye for innovation, and the bottom line Working at Xerox Park in Palo Alto as a summer student, Andy Bechtolsheim saw something in Xerox's Alto network workstation that Xerox itself couldn't: the possibilities of what such a machine could do with a high resolution display, a mouse, and a GUI. "The strange thing was [Xerox] never really productized it," Bechtolsheim says of the Alto, which inspired the creation of Apple's Lisa personal compute, as well as a machine that Bechtolsheim would build and dub the Stanford University Network -- or SUN -- workstation. Besides the convenience of a graphical interface, just not having to wait in a time share system for a few cycles was a "beautiful thing," Bechtolsheim recalls of the Alto and the later SUN workstation, which he envisioned as a tool primarily for CAD/CAM users. After Bechtolsheim's SUN workstation gave birth to Sun Microsystems, Bechtolsheim says he took a great deal of pride in the fact that his Sparc Workstation 1 and 2 drove half the revenue of the company for almost its first 10 years. As it turned out, spotting technology that has the potential to generate lots of revenue is something Bechtolsheim has a talent for. After leaving Sun in 1995, disappointed over the company's refusal to jump on the x86 bandwagon, Bechtolsheim found success with Granite Systems, a gigabit Ethernet switching company that Cisco acquired after a year. His next company, Kealia, was acquired by Sun in 2004, returning Bechtolsheim to the fold. Somewhere in between, Bechtolsheim also wrote a now legendary $100,000 check in 1998 to two more young Stanford grads -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- for what seemed like a promising idea: a search technology they called PageRank.Â  What did he see in Google that few others did? "It was a complete no-brainer," Bechtolsheim answers. Using the Internet to find things, he was frustrated that he couldnât find anything anymore, especially as companies started to game the system, as he calls it, by using key words to get a better placement. When Bechtolsheim heard about Google's ability to do page ranking, he knew that would solve the problem. It is said his $100,000 investment is now worth half a billion. Back at Sun after a long hiatus, Bechtolsheim says he's determined to put the company back on the track to the innovation and big profits that characterized its first 18 years. Whether or not he continues to have the Midas touch remains to be seen. -- Ephraim Schwartz Vinod Khosla: Scaling green tech Next to outsize personalities such as Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtelsheim, and Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla might seem like the silent partner from Sun's early days. But he's anything but, and the years since he left Sun have thrust him ever more into the spotlight. Khosla's stint with Sun was the shortest of the original founders. After helping establish the company with fellow grad students McNealy and Bechtolsheim in 1982, Khosla served briefly as CEO and then left the company in 1985 to join venture firm Kleiner Perkins. As a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and through his own Khosla Ventures, Khosla has thrown his chips into more than one Silicon Valley pot. He's scored big with companies such as Cerent and Juniper Networks, and fallen short with the likes of Excite@home. In an e-mail exchange with InfoWorld, Khosla recalled the heart-stopping excitement of the early years at Sun as it struggled with financing obstacles, technical problems, and the threat of losing marquis customers likes such as CAD/CAM giant Computervision. These days, Khosla tries to spend half his time on "traditional venture" and the other half on his new passion: green technology. Khosla was a strong backer of California's recent Proposition 87, which would have funded clean energy initiatives in the state. He's also a backer of research on ethanol to replace the United States' dependence on foreign oil. "My goal is to make green technologies cheaper than their fossil alternatives so they can scale beyond toys to actually making a big dent in fossil energy," Khosla wrote. Beyond clean energy, Khosla and his venture capital firm fund a nonprofit trust that backs work in areas such as microfinance, education, health, and affordable housing. As for the company he helped found 25 years ago? "Sun has plenty of strategies through which it could emerge as a powerhouse again," Khosla said. -- Paul Roberts Bill Joy: Thinking big about the future Bill Joy had earned his spot in the computer hall of fame even before he helped found Sun in 1982. While working as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s, Joy is credited with creating and disseminating the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) of the Unix operating system, and adding the TCP/IP stack to Unix, an act which earned him the sobriquet "father of the Internet." After helping to found Sun Microsystems in 1982, Bill Joy remained with the company until 2003, during which time he is credited with contributing to the creation of Java, Jini (aka Java Workspaces), andÂ  Sun's network file system (NFS). Joy even played a key role in designing the architecture for Sun's Sparc processors and the Solaris operating system. Since leaving Sun in 2003, Joy has focused his energies on the venture capital space, forming HighBar Ventures before joining Kleiner Perkins in 2005. While most of Joy's creativity has been focused on creating a better infrastructure for computing systems, he has also of late broadened those interests. In 2006 Joy helped start a multi-million dollar fund to design a more holistic approach to defend against biological viruses.Â  And for a man who it is said never even owned a rowboat, Joy is now building, according to Money Magazine, a $50 million high tech "green" yacht. The 190-foot wind-powered ship, the Ethereal, will be as green as Joy and his design team can make it, using among other things light-emitting diodes instead of incandescent light bulbs, a lithium-ion battery system to control fluctuations in electrical current, and propellers powered by diesel and electric motors in case the wind is out of the sails. -- Ephraim Schwartz Scott McNealy: Opening sourcing education For 25 years, the words coming out of Scott McNealy's mouth have been the best compass for ascertaining the direction in which Sun Microsystems was headed at any given moment. From pronouncements such as 1999's "software will all go free" to his screeds against Microsoft, McNealy has seldom hesitated to provide color commentary on the tech industry and on Sun's ever-evolving strategy. And, in many ways, the company's tenacity and predilection toward reinvention has been a reflection of McNealy's own personality as much as anything else. McNealy helped found Sun in 1982 as vice president of operations and later became CEO, completing a transformation from UAW shop foreman to Silicon Valley entrepreneur that was set in motion as a student at Harvard. It was a job he would stay in for 22 years before handing company reins to Jonathan Schwartz in April of 2006. These days, McNealy stays busy as Sun's Chairman and chief booster. He's also pouring his energies into the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC), a nonprofit he spun off from Sun in January that provides free, Web-based curricula and resources to teachers, students, and parents. -- Jason Snyder
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In the second of a two-part interview, Open Systems Development Labs chief Stuart Cohen gives his views on Linux security, desktops, the Domino effect towards Linux, and why Microsoft will eventually port to Linux.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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(InfoWorld) - Munich has begun its migration to Linux on the desktop, a year later than planned and nearly three years since the city announced itsÂ move to open source software. "There have been someÂ delays along the wayÂ but we're now moving steadily ahead," Florian Schiessl, manager of the Limux project for the city of Munich, said Thursday by telephone. Since Tuesday, the first 100 of the city's 14,000 PCs have been switched from Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office applications to Linux and OpenOffice. "Today, we're still working in both the Windows and Linux worlds," Schiessl said. "But over the next two years, the Linux world will get bigger, while the Windows world will get smaller." A full migration to Linux is "unrealistic," Schiessl said. Some hardware and software products in the public administration will continue to require Windows and some, particularly in the area of desktop publishing, will continue to require systems from Apple Computer, he said. By the end of this year, the city of Munich plans to have migrated 200 computers to the open source desktop environment. "Most of these computers are used for relatively simple office communications," he said. The configuration is based on Linux Distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, the KDE 3.5 user interface and OpenOffice 2. The Limux team has established guidelines to help overcome format conversion issues between Microsoft and open source products, according to Schiessl. "With OpenOffice, we don't have a problem opening and reading Microsoft formats and, with most simple documents, we don't have any processing problems," he said. "But, in some cases, there can be format loss, and some documents need to be handled in a special way to avoid format conversion problems. Our guidelines address these issues." One of the bigger challenges moving ahead, Schiessl said, will be to migrate some of the public administration's larger departments with more complex processes. "Big departments with specialized processes will be a challenge, but we have a plan to tackle this and expect to achieve our goal of having around 80 percent of all desktop systems running on Linux by the end of 2008." Delays in the Limux project began with the dispute over software patent issues, followed by longer than expected negotiations with companies bidding for the contract to provide system configuration and support services. On top of that was a one-year extension of the pilot phase. "Because of the complexity of this migration project, we decided to have a very thorough pilot phase," Schiessl said. He declined to comment on the decision by the city of Bergen, Norway, to delay its Linux desktop plans by two years, largely for lack of detailed information about the decision. In September, the Norwegian city decided to focus on building an e-government portal first and later migrate its Windows-based systems to a Linux environment. Vienna is another big European city with ambitious plans to roll out Linux in its public administration.
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Open-source software advocates got a potential boost from a report by the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce, which cited advantages on the server side and a growing maturity on the desktop front.
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PC Magazine - At EclipseWorld, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich shares the secret sauce of open-source ingredients that draws developers to the platform.
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After public complaints amassed over what seemed to be reluctance on the part of SWsoft's Parallels division to turn over to open source developers modifications it made to their code, Parallels told BetaNews this afternoon it has done just that.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed up Thursday evening at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and declared he would not answer questions about the GNU general public license version 3, but he did disclose his lifelong fantasy concerning open source licensing. The GPLv3, which is expected to be released at noon on Friday, has been the focus of a public exchange between Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds over the future of open source licensing and the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux. Schwartz, who briefly stopped to talk to reporters, said he wants licensing to be kept simple. "I want to get to uniform licenses for everything we do," Schwartz said. "So if you look at Sun you say 'Oh, I know you. I get you.'" Schwartz did not say which license he was considering. Sun has developed its own open source license, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Then he added, "One of my great fantasies in life is that the number of people with opinions on open source licenses will come roughly into balance with the number of people who have read them." "Go read the Mozilla license," he said. "It is very difficult for an international company to use it because it is for the [United States] only. What do I tell people in China? Sorry, if you have a gripe you need to come back to Santa Clara," he said with a laugh. Schwartz then took the stage and joked with the audience, thanking them for Sun's fourth-quarter revenue. He then talked about helping customers to condense their infrastructure by consolidating workloads, to run virtualized infrastructure at scale, and to develop compelling services. He singled out identity as one of those services. He then laid out Sun's position on open source software and licensing. "The core value of Sun comes down to a basic set of things," he said. "Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity." "We're every way thinking to combine the communities because we think that gives us the critical mass to go after the big opportunities in the marketplace." Shortly afterward Schwartz welcomed questions from the crowd, but added "just not about GPLv3, please." Earlier this month, Torvalds used the Linux Kernel Mailing List to slam Sun in responding to a post about Sun and open source licensing: "You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that Sun is in this to actually further some open source agenda." He then launched into a "cynical prediction" slamming Sun's licensing interests around the OpenSolaris kernel and GPLv3, and predicting Sun would use licensing to protect patents on its ZFS file system rather than make it freely and widely available to the open source community. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and kernel developers have said there is little chance the Linux community would move to the new GPLv3 because it is not significantly better than GPLv2 and could take six months or more to convert all the components of the kernel. "A GPLv3-only release [of the OpenSolaris kernel] would actually let [Sun] look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," Torvalds wrote. A day later, Schwartz responded on his blog in a friendly tone disputing Torvalds contention the Linux hurts Sun and saying Linux was not the enemy. Schwartz, writing on his blog, addresses Torvalds personally: "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense." Like the licensing, there also was no word Thursday night about dinner.
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FRANKFURT, GermanyÂ -- Tough economic times in Germany have made Linux and other open source software products appear tantalizing to local businesses. Yet many remain hesitant to dump their Microsoft Corp. software completely, if for no other reasons than it performs relatively well, and nearly everyone in corporate Germany uses it. That was the general impression from speakers delivering presentations Tuesday at the LinuxWorld conference in Frankfurt.
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As the Zend Developer Zone points out there's a new interview over on the PHPWomen.org website with Nancy Wichmann, one of the members of the PHP Women group, about some of her development experiences.   NancyW - a well known drupal developer, documentation contributor, module developer/maintainer apart from these a prestigious WOMEN in the world of opensource.   The interviewer asks a wide range of questions (with some interesting answers!) on topics ranging from her college major, how she got interested in Drupal out to things like her good/bad experiences in the open source world and some advice for those new to the community.