Schwartz Defends Sun's Open-Source Investment, Demonstrates Mad Hatter
At a keynote at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Schwartz also gave attendees a demonstration of Sun's forthcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop, as well as a sneak peek at a project called Looking Glass, a 3-D version of Mad Hatter that hints at future GUI possibilities of desktop operating systems.
"You have to judge us by our actions," Schwartz told attendees, reminding them of various Sun open-source contributions, such as its peer-to-peer technology JXTA, the StarOffice suite of office productivity applications and its NetBeans Java IDE. "We know we've been a phenomenal contributor [to open source]."
For example, Schwartz maintained that StarOffice alone has exceeded more than 40 million downloads. This not only shows that Sun is committed to providing customers with open-source software options, but, more importantly, proves that customers are looking for an alternative to Microsoft Windows, and therefore opening up revenue possibilities for Sun, he said.
Schwartz also used his keynote to show off Sun's Project Mad Hatter Linux desktop, the release of which, originally scheduled for summer, has been pushed back until the fall.
Sun's software leader successfully demonstrated the use of Real Player and the Mozilla browser on an alpha version of the desktop OS.
The Mad Hatter GUI has bears a striking resemblance to Windows, which will make it easy for current Windows users to adopt. Yet it runs open-source software like the GNOME interface, Mozilla browser, Evolution e-mail program and StarOffice productivity suite.
Schwartz invited attendees to have their companies to begin evaluating Mad Hatter for free. He also extended this opportunity to solution providers "fed up" with Microsoft's licensing fees for Windows.
Schwartz said he hopes Mad Hatter will invalidate popular notions he's heard from Sun customers, such as "Linux makes Sun irrelevant," and "Linux leaves Microsoft unscathed."
Schwartz also made sure he promoted Sun's plans to continue to support Solaris as its key server operating environment, even as many solution providers and observers say Unix is the No. 1 technology from which customers are migrating to Linux.
"[We're not] going to throw away Solaris and adopt Linux, that's not going to happen," Schwartz said. "We are doubling back with our [investment] on Solaris." Schwartz said Sun will continue to support Linux "where it runs best, on Intel," but that selling Solaris on Intel-based servers will be Sun's primary OS and hardware strategy.
However, Schwartz said that rather than block opportunities for Sun by replacing Unix, Linux, which runs hand in hand with Java, means new opportunities to drive Sun's vision of a world where myriad devices and appliances are connected to the Internet.
"If anything, Linux opens up the network for huge applications and makes us even more relevant," Schwartz said. "Linux drives Java and hopefully, Java is driving Linux. ... These two are a match made in heaven."