The Hindu Business Line : Open source can be very `benefit-driven'

Over the last five years, the IT community has seen a consuming increase in the usage of open-source technologies and acknowledged the role Sun Microsystems played in the process.

Matt Thomson, Director of Technology Outreach and the Open-Source Programs Office, Sun Microsystems Inc, was in India recently for the company's annual developer conference, Sun Tech Days. eWorld spoke to him between his lectures. Excerpts from the conversation:

In a world that is increasingly becoming `each one for himself', how do you explain the success of open source collaborations?

There are basically two sides to it. A consumer side; and a producer side. The concept here is that 99 per cent of the world would consume open-source; be it a person who downloads a program like open office or be it a developer who uses somebody else's code. The other 1 per cent are the people who actually produce open-source. And the value for open source is for both parties. From the consumer side, one can download an open-source program, use it and be totally confident that you're never going to be `locked-in'. The file formats are open; if one doesn't like the service provided by a particular company, one can go to another company and still not lose the functionality of the product. That's not the case with closed-source products where one is `locked-in' with the vendor.

From the production side, the developers who work with open-source get to build on the ideas that came before them. So unlike in closed-source, where somebody in, say, `Company A', can come up with something interesting; but someone in `Company B' can't work on it because it's locked-in — it's a property stored inside Company A's walls. In an open-source world, everybody shares. But it's not so much a case of a community that gets together and works on behalf of a project or a piece of software. Here everybody shares because everybody benefits. So, it's a very personal thing.

Many people confuse open-source to be a kind of selfless movement that strives to make things better. Open-source can be very `benefit-driven' as well. Here is an opportunity to take somebody else's good ideas, build something on top of it and make money on it! So, the world now sees it as a route to personal success and that's where open-source's success lies.

Back in 2001, Bill Gates described open-source as `Pac-man-like' in nature. Has the view of the critics of open-source changed in the meanwhile?

I won't say that closed-source people's opinions have changed; but they have become less relevant in the last five or six years. To give an analogy, historically whenever people argued about, say, whether the world became flat or how the dinosaurs disappeared, there were always two sides to the argument. In the end, as time goes along, as the truth comes out, one side becomes less relevant.

In this case, I think the evidence is overwhelming that open-source is a successful and viable alternative to closed-source systems. It has reached higher levels of innovation, it's more cost-effective and has more developer involvement. But, do I expect the other side to come over? No. I only think they will become less and less important in the community of IT.

What is Sun Microsystems' strategy with open-source technologies?

It's very simple. We believe that volume drives value. The more developers use our technologies, more is the value we get out of the relationship. If more machines use our technology, if more data-centres are built on our product, the easier it is for us to win in the market.

The less inhibitors we put to software developers accessing our technologies, the better are our chances in the market place. If more people use our stuff, more people will recommend our stuff and more are the sales we make. So, we're throwing open everything that we have.

In open-source, the compensation for your contribution is not immediate. So, is there a time in future when people may rethink their open-source commitments?

You have to have a strategy. Here, we sell service and support to our open-source technologies; and we also sell the hardware. As a systems company, we use our software as a business opportunity for our hardware. So, we've made all our software free. If one wants support, we'll provide it like we do for Red Hat.

It's the same strategy we used for Open Solaris. Open Solaris had 7.1 million registered downloads in the last 14 months that it was made free. Sixty per cent of that number is on non-Sun Microsystems hardware. So, because we open-sourced Solaris, we opened up our market to HP, Dell and any others. It's up to us now to go and offer service contracts (on the operating system) to all these people who were not our market earlier; and eventually sell them Sun hardware.

How long, do you think, will this `participation age' last? Will there be a petering out?

Well, about 1,10,000 students will hit the Indian IT market in the next 12 months. All of them are trained on Internet technologies. Multiply that by 6X worldwide and you have about three-quarters of a million students who don't know anything about the old way of building software. They only know about the new way of building software. They only know about how to build a Yahoo, a Google and a YouTube. `Participation age' is just a moniker we stuck on the sea change that's happening in the way software and services are built, distributed, used and monetised.

In the past, we used to take up to 18 months to build software. Today, your venture capitalist will give you money for three months. You've to get your first version out in three months and if it's liked he'll fund you for the next generation — one more month. This is where participation and collaboration come into the picture. You have to compete in shorter and shorter cycles of delivery. Look at this event (The developer conference where the interview took place).

A few years ago, a lot of youngsters who came here had a question for us: When can I work for Sun? Today, not many ask that question because they are already using our technologies and developing our products. They are already hired! So, do I see a petering out? No. I think it will evolve into something else. I don't think we will go back to shrink-wrap software.

Your company's Web site says that your open-source initiatives are `many'. Can you put a number to that?

In fact, I'd say it's more than `many'. Recently, the EU came forward and said in its report that we're indeed the largest supporter to open-source in the world. All of Sun's software is either already open-source or in the process of becoming open-source. We've contributed more source code than any other entity on the planet. Open Solaris is the largest single project ever to go open-source in the world.

Then you throw in all the Java flavours and that makes us the largest developer-source contributor in the world. So, `many' that you asked is, for us, `all'.

What do you see as Sun's biggest contribution to open-source?

Open Solaris, the largest contribution ever. If you look at value in terms of revenue, it's the Java suite of products. A recent study put the size of India's Java economy at 2.1 per cent of the GDP!

How are the Governments taking to open-source?

Very well. We were actually talking to the Governments of Malaysia and Vietnam in using Java for their needs even before we made it open-source. Brazil's whole healthcare system is built on open-source technologies. In China, everybody builds something for the Government and they use open-source. The EU has used it. Essentially open-source is bridging the gap between what governments were using five years ago to what they will be using five years from now.

rkanth@thehindu.co.in