My good friend Mr. J.C. Carlos! How are you doing today sir?
I hope the world is treating you in the manner in which you have become accustomed! Please sir, do not pay undue attention to the plunge in the stock market! The value of these issues fluctuate almost on a daily basis! They go up and down, and sometimes sideways too! If that were indeed not the case, than how could we be saying even that we *had* a market? That's right, we could not! So I hope your equanimity is not terribly de-tranquilized by the fact that your most favorite securities in the Nasdaq are plummeting down like a chunk of Osmium toward the center of the earth, because that is no more than a temporary condition that is most highly likely to resolve itself in the fullness of time, hopefully sooner rather than later!
Speaking of which by sheer coincidence, I happened today upon a wonderful article by my most unfavorite and most repulsive and annoying financial and technical columnist, the Reliably Fatuous Mr. Jim Seymour, a prolific writer of more words with less meaning than 1000 monkeys could type if you gave them all eternity! It is a most unfortunate circumstance that the skillful management team of Sun Microsystems has provided Mr. Jim Seymour with the raw material for this particular oily dip into the bit bucket with their ambivalent and often less-than-crystal clear stance toward the free and open software movement! But that too is only a temporary circumstance because in the long run from dust we art and to dust we shall return!
But I sincerely hope that you will pass a pleasant few moments reading the scrambled thinking of this distinguished scoundrel!
And I hope the rest of the afternoon brings you great happiness!
Your most obdurate and faithful cyber-acquaintance,
--QwikSand
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Sun's New Ploy With Solaris
By Jim Seymour
Special to TheStreet.com
1/25/00 7:50 PM ET
It wasn't an accident that Sun Microsystems (SUNW:Nasdaq - news) ranked high on my list of 25 Stocks for 2000 posted here earlier this month. Sun's server business is roaring; the company is achieving the kind of economies of scale that are supposed to accompany greater volumes; and before long we'll see new machines from Sun which will replace today's aging models. Strong company; strong year ahead.
So is this strong year likely to be helped or hurt by Sun's widely anticipated (and much-leaked) announcement Wednesday that it is releasing the newest version of its proprietary Unix variant, Solaris, under its Community Source License -- in other words, at least, by most press accounts, a Linux-like license?
Put this one up on the "less-than-meets-the-eye" board.
Sun management contains no fools, at least among the folks I know there. They're not killing a big corporate asset, and no, they're not -- gasp! -- giving away Solaris. But they'd sure like for us to think that's the plan.
Sun's actions are, of course, very much in its own self-interest. And to understand why the Sun Community Source License, or SCLS, ain't the same thing as Linux's distribution under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, or GPL, you've gotta read both. And in Sun's case, read between the lines a little.
Software available under the GPL must truly be released to the entire computer-programming and computer-using community. Anyone can take it for free, modify it as they wish, distribute it -- and is obligated only to return to that community, so to speak, the custom code they develop. In effect, truly "free" software.
By contrast, Sun's move to license Solaris 8 to developers carries some gotchas: It won't be cost-free, Sun still owns everything and if you distribute your own software including any of the Solaris 8 code, you pay Sun a licensing fee, per copy.
A little background on what's going on here:
This isn't new, though the press is poised to report it that way. Sun announced back in February, 1999, a year ago, that it would be releasing the Solaris 8 source code under its SCLS program.
The timing is no accident: Sun wants to rub Microsoft's (MSFT:Nasdaq - news) nose in this sort-of-free business, on the cusp of Microsoft's shipment of Windows 2000 (formerly Windows NT) in a couple of weeks.
Sun is worried about Linux, and this is an effort to grab a little of the Linux-y glow for Solaris.
Sun has repeatedly said it won't develop internally a version of Linux for its own Sparc-chip-based hardware, though it does make available its Star Office application software package, and of course Java, for Linux. (And Linux for Sun is widely available from others.)
Sun is worried about the incursion of Intel (INTC:Nasdaq - news)-chip-based servers onto turf that has traditionally been all-Sun. Solaris running on Sparc-based Sun servers is a robust solution, with extensive support for multiple processors, fail-over designs, etc. But increasingly, all-Sun hardware closets are being replaced with rooms full of much cheaper, almost-as-robust Intel-chip-based machines running Linux. Sun's business is selling hardware, not software, so it needs to do everything it can to slow that move. Slow, mind you, not reverse; that would be impossible, at this point. Linux-on-Intel just has too much momentum.
So don't mistake the Sun announcement tomorrow as an endorsement of the "open source" movement, nor of an era of free operating systems from Sun.
It's just a smart, hold-back-the-waters move from a powerful company worried that forces beyond its control are working to make it a much less powerful company.
I'm betting on Sun here. But the contest is far from settled, the victory far from certain.
Linux, on truly industrial-strength hardware, has an almost-unstoppable momentum right now. And Sun, the great popularizer of Unix computing over the past decade and a half, knows that, to its great discomfort.
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Jim Seymour is president of Seymour Group, an information-strategies consulting firm working with corporate clients in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and a longtime columnist for PC Magazine. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. At time of publication, neither Seymour nor Seymour Group held positions in any securities mentioned in this column, although holdings can change at any time. Seymour does not write about companies that are current or recent consulting clients of Seymour Group. While Seymour cannot provide investment advice or recommendations, he invites your feedback at jseymour@thestreet.com. |
