This is causing some consternation among open source and free software advocates, who are concerned mostly about MySQL falling into Oracle’s clutches and being summarily dispatched. I’m not savvy on open source DBs so I’ll leave commentary on that one to those who know something. What might happen to Java though?

Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul thinks Oracle will be good for open source Java:

Sun’s dictatorial control over the evolution of Java has been widely criticized by other stakeholders and is generally viewed as detrimental to the language’s growth and adoption potential. The Java Community Process (JCP) has been a particularly thorny source of controversy and friction.

Oracle could finally democratize the JCP by making it more transparent and inclusive. Sun’s overt hostility towards the Apache Software Foundation’s Harmony project, which seeks to build an Apache-licensed Java SE implementation, could also finally be brought to an end.

Bad, bad Sun! Now the community can rejoice! But wait… Here’s Glyn Moody of ComputerWorld who thinks overall it will be good but perhaps not so great for open source:

The downside is that Oracle’s feelings about open source – and hence its advocacy – are probably more ambiguous than Sun’s. In particular, it seems to have very little truck with the more idealistic leanings of the free software side of things. Pragmatists might rejoice at that, but it does mean that Oracle will be aiming to use open source as a tool rather than see itself as an evangelist with a mission to convert.

Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, in a report on a press conference after the Ubuntu 9.04 launch, is sanguine:

“I’m sure Oracle has carefully thought through everything it committed [itself] to [and] there will be no reversal of the idea that Java should be widely available and available as open source,” Shuttleworth said during a press conference today to launch ubuntu 9.04 upgrade.

“It’s a one-way trip,” Canonical chief said about the process of making software open source. “What is interesting [about the Oracle-Sun deal] is that it really cements the idea that free and open source software is the profound driving force in software today. ”

Shuttleworth is correct. Once a code base has been open sourced, the community has the power to take the code and run, if they don’t like the direction a project is headed. Having had first-hand experience with the power of community thought leaders to influence even Java, the largest and most corporate of code bases, this is a lesson Oracle will learn. Either they’ll learn it the hard way, or they’ll learn it from people at Sun who understand this stuff deeply, and whose expertise could save Oracle a lot of trouble.

Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady sums up the most likely scenario of all:

However the politics resolve themselves or not, though, the Java landscape is characterized as much by its inertia as anything else. Ergo any potential shifts in the landscape here are likely to be glacial in pace. I’d expect something very akin to the status quo for the foreseeable future.

Time – lots of it – will tell.

There is a heckuva big investment in Java software across the IT industry, and so it is interesting to think about where this platform might go if Sun, the inventor and “steward” of Java, gets swallowed by IBM, the company that has made the most money on Java over the years.

IBM has bet a big piece of its software strategy on Java. A long-term licensee, IBM has been a leader in the JCP, built and then contributed to open source the most popular Java IDE (Eclipse), has long marketed one of the leading Java-based middleware product lines (WebSphere), and builds lots of well-regarded Java plumbing, including virtual machines, Java EE implementations, tools and embedded versions – the works. Even as IBM and Sun have cooperated in promoting and advancing the Java platform, they’ve competed on implementations and have at times not seen eye to eye on where the Java standard should go, and how the platform should be governed.

Sun’s software strategy over the past few years has been to intensively open source its marquee software platforms, including Solaris, and Java, in order to drive platform adoption by developers. Sun’s FOSS platforms are free as in – zero cost to acquire, and Free – as in, built by a community of developers and licensed to eliminate proprietary lock-in. The hope is that developers, and the enterprises they work for, will adopt Sun technology as the plumbing on which they build their critical business applications and processes if acquisition cost is zero, and their investment in time and effort are protected. Once ready to deploy, some fraction of these customers may choose to buy support. Oh… and gear to run it on – software DOES still require a computer to run it, even in the cloud.

All of this is spelled out in Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, and is party line and marketing message. But there’s a bit of subtlety that isn’t apparent until you actually try to use the FOSS Java code, especially in embedded applications. Sun has done well over the years licensing its Java ME software to those building devices. The company has a legitimate business interest in maintaining these significant licensing revenues (pdf – see pg. 6). The GPLv2 license without the Classpath exception, chosen for Java ME can be impractical for an embedded device maker to use, as it includes a “copyleft” provision requiring that modifications to the code, or other code linked to the GPL code must also be published as source code, under the GPL license. So, the recipe to any “secret sauce” must be freely available under the GPL. Hardly something that excites a handset maker, for example. Why not use Java SE then – since smartphones and other advanced devices have the power to handle it? Not so fast! There are some even more mind-bendingly complicated licensing issues for Java SE that riled up the Apache Software Foundation, related to this embedded device revenue. Ever wonder why Google’s open source Android platform – which looks startlingly similar to Java SE in many respects, is nonetheless not based on Sun’s open source code, but rather on Apache’s Harmony project? One can speculate…

IBM approaches open source platforms differently. Rather than monetizing open source only by selling support for deployers, or by choosing licenses that drive commercial licensees to keep paying, IBM distributes FOSS code that comes from elsewhere – often non-profit foundations such as the Apache Software Foundation – but licensed in such a way that IBM can bundle proprietary extensions with the FOSS code. This lets IBM add value, create something unique, and yet leverage the open source development model and the momentum of FOSS adoption for the bulk of the code they ship. Good idea! Get the benefits, and still sell stuff and make money. This approach doesn’t annoy licensees, and keeps communities happy and burnishes IBM’s FOSS credibility by contributing to independent FOSS projects. Seems to work for them too.

What would Java look like, if it was ideally suited for IBM to profit from it, using the same approach? Maybe IBM would donate Java to ASF, making it an Apache project. Or donate it to Eclipse? Perhaps they might spin it off as part of a “Java Foundation” or something equivalent, licensed under the ASL, or perhaps the EPL – the Eclipse Public License. It is interesting to think about the role of the JCP if Java were to become a code base built within a non-profit foundation, rather than controlled by a corporation as it has been with Sun. Would the JCP even be needed anymore, and if so, who would pay for platform JSRs? How much code, and staff, would IBM contribute to help the platform evolve? What commercial extensions could IBM sell? What would embedded Java look like as an IBM product? Would Google still need Android as a separate code base? Or could they adopt “real” Java under such conditions? Could IBM unify the fractured Java ME ecosystem?

IBM is much less of a charity than Sun. Perhaps that is why they’re making money and Sun is shopping for a suitor. But under IBM, it seems to me that Java is likely to remain FOSS, under a very liberal license – arguably even more liberal than GPLv2. Of course the existing code will always be available under GPLv2 as well.

Would IBM be a good steward of Java? What do you think?

Stephen nails it when he says that Sun is engineering driven, and that is the root of its problems. And he almost gets it when he says about balancing engineering and business model driven culture:

The point here is not to advocate one approach at the expense of another, but to recognize that both have their time and place, and that an organization that is dominated by either an engineering or business model culture is likely to be one sided.

He is absolutely right that both have their time and place. Engineering driven culture’s time is early in the technology adoption life cycle, when innovation drives value for customers. Business model driven culture’s time is when technologies mature, and relationships, service, product line extensions, and capitalizing on economies of scale determine who wins. So which culture is right for here and now?

There was a time when raw innovation could determine who got the purchase order in enterprise computing infrastructure. That time is long past, as this industry has matured. IBM recognized this shift back in the early 1990s, encouraged by nearly missing its payroll. They hired a cookie salesman to be the CEO, whose brilliant insight was that computers and cookies follow the same rules of business. IBM restructured, leveraging their size to deliver relationships, services, and product line extensions. Smart move – but it takes a businessperson and outsider, not an engineer, to have that insight and execute on it.

Cloud computing is a business model innovation, not a technology innovation. Jonathan Schwartz recognized this trend years ago when he called computing a commodity, and rightly forecast its delivery over the network, just like electricity. Unfortunately for Sun however, Jonathan is also engineering driven. Here’s his conclusion:

As I pointed out in some of my earlier musings, there’s a sense of dysphoria among those that see computers as commoditizing, a belief that no one can make any money if the technology’s interchangeable. In my view, the great thing about commodities, whether financial services, telecommunications, oil and gas, and now computing – is that the companies whose business it is to monetize those commodities, along with the businesses that supply the technologies necessary to compete in a commodity market, are among the largest on earth.

Vodafone, Citigroup, Exxon Mobil. What do they have in common?

1) They’re among the most valuable businesses on earth.
2) They’re primarily technology companies. 3) They’re among the largest buyers of technology in the world. And
4) They’re all in commodity businesses.

And how do they all thrive?

Innovation.

This is all 100% smack-on correct except for the very last word. Leaving aside that some of the companies Jonathan cited aren’t thriving right now because of other issues, these companies have done well not by innovating on technology, but rather by innovating on business model in their own markets, by relentlessly executing to reduce their costs, and by leveraging immense economies of scale. They buy a lot of computers. But computing isn’t the product they peddle, it is a raw material. They treat it like any other raw material – they buy it as cheaply as they can.

What should Sun do, then? Is it too late to turn the rich technology and human assets still part of the company into profits? Perhaps not, but time has nearly run out, and the changes necessary for Sun to profit as an independent company in today’s mature market would turn it into a very different entity than it has been. In the world of computing infrastructure, the time for innovation as the primary driver of value has passed – at least until some radical new breakthrough displaces today’s technology. I don’t know if the current management of Sun – engineers all – have the stomach or the skills needed to save the company. Sure, one can run down the list of technologies at Sun – Java, Solaris, SPARC/CMT, open storage, MySQL, OpenOffice – the list goes on and on, a testament to the brilliant minds who’ve worked at Sun over many years – and talk about what to do with each one of them. But that exercise misses the point.

Engineers really do believe in the better mousetrap. But well-worn truisms such as the technology life cycle can’t simply be declared irrelevant. These patterns are  the consequence of human behavior over time, writ large in a globally interconnected, capitalist economy. They’re bigger than any one company, technology, or industry.

Sun’s woes stem from managements’ belief that Sun’s technology and markets are exempt from the laws of economics and business, and that innovation will always be the most valuable differentiator. This is no more true for computing infrastructure than it was for autos, steel, electricity, printing, air travel, or any other industry. The computing infrastructure business is a classically mature, low differentiation, fragmented, standardized industry in which commoditized hardware, open source and free software, standardized protocols, low brand loyalty, minimal switching costs, and a proven ability for customers to integrate backwards into vendors’ markets all reduce supplier market power and force vendors to compete on price, relationships, marketing, service levels, and distribution. Sun is a product innovation machine, but is outclassed by its competition in all of these other areas that today determine the winners.

What should Sun do? I don’t see an answer to that question that preserves Sun as we know it.