Showing posts with label scott mcnealy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scott mcnealy. Show all posts

02 March 2009

Sun's McNealy Sees the Light on Open Source

If you were looking for a sign of the times in computing, you could do worse than consider the trajectory of Scott McNealy. When he was running Sun, open source in his view was pretty much the un-American cancer that Microsoft had proclaimed it to be - largely because of the inroads that GNU/Linux was making against Sun's proprietary Solaris. That was then; this is now....

On Open Enterprise blog.

21 January 2009

Scott McNealy Writing Gov Paper on Open Source

Hmm, not sure whether this is totally good news:

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

"It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said.

"Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

Well, that's all true, but is McNealy really the person to give this message? He was always very ambivalent about open source during his time as boss of Sun. I'd rather Jonathan Schwartz were writing that report....

17 April 2007

McNealy Calls for Merger of ODF and UOF

Readers of this blog may recall mentions of the third document format, China's UOF (click on UOF tag below for more on the subject). Well, here's an interesting idea from Sun's Scott McNealy: merge UOF with ODF.

01 May 2006

W(h)ither Sun?

McNealy leaving Sun is certainly the end of an era. But the big question is: what follows?

As far as Jonathan Schwartz is concerned, too much is being made (a) of his ponytail, and (b) of his blog. Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking is this panegyric:

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And ... I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who did all these things, and did them entirely out of altruism, but supposedly about McNealy, who did nothing on the same scale, and did it for the dosh. If this is the quality of analysis we can expect from the new head of Sun, it's probably time to find some comfortable chairs, order a dry sherry, and to enjoy the imminent sunset.