"The software industry is going through exactly the same transition (as media companies). Seven years ago, StarOffice and Solaris, to take a couple examples of key products at Sun, were built by our own employees. The source code to both was available under restrictive licenses, but our (equivalently Pulitzer Prize winning) engineers wrote 100% of the code. With very limited input from the community. We listened to users (and their letters to the editor), certainly, but we didn't allow them to touch the code (or lay out the front page). We were in control."

The above is from a recent post by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz in his blog. This is the second of what may be a series of ruminations on the state of open source software and what major software companies (such as Microsoft and Sun) should be doing about it. In an earlier post, he had criticized Microsoft (without mentioning the company by name) and Redmond's current view that open source software may be violating several hundred of its patents. Drawing a parallel to Sun's situation in the late 90s, Schwartz obliquely talks about Linux in his most recent post:

"Our biggest competitor became, in the late 1990's, a product built by a company that aggregated and organized software from the open source community. They built little of their own, they relied on the software equivalent of community content, or Free and Open Source Software.

"Could we have sued them? Sure. Sun has what I'd argue to be the single most valuable and focused patent portfolio on the web (and yes, we'd use it to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu, both). But suing the open source community would've been tantamount to a newspaper suing the authors of their letters to the editor. We would've been attempting to censor rather than embrace a free press. It might have felt good at the time, but it wouldn't have addressed the broader challenge - community content was becoming more interesting to our customers than our professional content.

"What have we done since then? We dropped the price to free on both products, made the code available as Free software, and got busy engaging rather than fighting the open source community. Rather than diminishing revenue, this singular action amplifiied Sun's business opportunities - not everywhere, but among those that see downtime as more expensive than a service subscription (another word we share with traditional media). Want proof? - take a peek at this mashup, click "Blank" in the upper right hand corner to hide the satellite map, and ask yourself if Sun could possibly have fueled adoption at that global scale without embracing Free software (the answer is a definitive, "no"). And whether those that downloaded might be interested in everything else we build (the answer is "yes")."

Schwartz also touts OpenOffice as a growing alternative to Microsoft Office, and says that the path to a restored SUNW stock price "is to embrace community content, not litigate against it."

What was that?

In any case, the entire entry can be found in Jonathan's Blog.