How has your relationship with Scott McNealy changed in the last year since you became president? For example, are you in agreement or in disagreement more often than you used to be?
There are some environments in which I can complete the guy's sentences. There are other environments where we just disagree -- and by the way, it's about 50-50. It's always been that way. It's never going to change...it's a highly communicative relationship. Plus, I send email to the guy at 12:30 at night and I get a response at 12:31. That's an unusual boss relationship.
Clearly you're confident that you'll be able to build a vibrant community around OpenSolaris.
I just find it laughable that Red Hat [CEO] Matthew [Szulik] can no longer claim we're proprietary. He's reduced to saying, "Yeah, but they'll never build a community because they don't know how." Sorry guys, we've been building communities for 20 years.
In Sun's perfect OpenSolaris world, what will the balance of power be between Sun and non-Sun folks?
In the advisory board [governing OpenSolaris] the majority will not be Sun. [In comparison], Red Hat makes proprietary decisions [such as] whether or not they put Jonas [Java server software] into Red Hat. They made that decision exclusively, without input from the community.
We expect that the governance model and the community model we build around Solaris will be as big a competitive weapon against Red Hat as the innovation within Solaris. We know that they have frustrated such a broad portion of their customer base that there is opportunity for us to really excel in ways that aren't necessarily technology-related. The governance model we use will be more open source and transparent. We'll be really meaning free when we talk about free and open source software. Red Hat binaries aren't free. It will have genuine protection from a patent portfolio and indemnity against all intellectual-property claims, which for our customers will be something, I think, that's a real differentiator. Red Hat doesn't provide that.
