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"Freedom is scary; but on balance I think Javas new path will be more interesting and more profitable and more fun." Tim Bray Sun's Director of Web on his Java Is Free blog.
The big question is how much more profitable will free Java be?
"Freedom is scary; but on balance I think Javas new path will be more interesting and more profitable and more fun." Tim Bray Sun's Director of Web on his Java Is Free blog.
The big question is how much more profitable will free Java be? Perhaps a GPL'ed Java will have a huge impact,
but good luck putting a number on that impact. Sun has never broken out
profits from Java and any change to that wouldn't come until July 2007
when Sun's new fiscal year begins, says Brent Bracelin, an analyst at
Pacific Crest Securities. "It's tough to make assumptions and break out
one component such as software," says Bracelin. Bottom line: There's no
baseline for comparison.Sun's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission
also don't yield a lot of clues about how much money the company was
yielding from Java. The conventional wisdom is that Sun has failed to
monetize Javaa contention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz danced around
in a May Q&A with Forbes. Sun's annual report notes the company is
selling "solutions" with four components: systems, storage, software
and services.
"Open Source Initiatives such as OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, Open Source
Availability of Netbeans, Java Development Tools, Java Middleware and
Java Platform Technologies are aimed to significantly increase
participation in processor architecture development, software and
application design by making cutting-edge hardware and software
intellectual property freely available. This helps lower barriers to
the next big build-out of the Internet, encourage innovation and foster
bringing new products to market," says Sun in its annual report.
The rub: Sun's financials don't give much of a hint of how software
revenue looks. Any revenue derived from software is lumped into a
category dubbed "products" says Bracelin. That category includes sub
categories called computer systems and data management products.
Computer systems revenue for the year ending June 30 was up 2.9 percent
from a year ago to $5.99 billion with most of the growth coming from
data management. Total revenue for the year was $13 billion. In other
words: Your guess to Java revenue is as good as mine.
Whatever internal figures Sun is looking at it's clear that the
profits of keeping Java in its fold aren't looking nearly as good as
what Sun can get from selling additional services. And more developers on board playing with Java
may mean Sun can sell more servers and storage gear. For Sun's
positioning as a go-to infrastructure provider maybe open sourcing Java
makes sense if it can poach Red Hat's model with Linux, which is
currently under siege. The proof will appear in about four quarters in
Sun's financialsassuming that software is eventually broken out.
Read the original article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3940 |
