Sun CEO takes a swing at, well, everything

by Stefan Dubowski

November 11, 2004 —

Sun Microsystems Inc. chairman and CEO Scott McNealy defended his company's open source track record in an occasionally raucous meeting with members of the Canadian press last week.

McNealy, visiting customers and the press in Toronto on Nov. 5, bristled at the suggestion that Sun was pressured into making its latest version of the Solaris operating system (OS) available to open source developers.

"Pressure? It fascinates me how people think the world operates, that I'm some sort of politician running for office. There are absolute legal issues," McNealy said, pointing out that Sun had to rid the OS of some proprietary code before open sourcing it.

On Nov. 15 Sun plans to unveil Solaris 10, the first example of the OS to be available on an open-source basis. It features technology called Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a way for administrators to tweak the platform for maximum performance. Solaris 10 also sports "containers" that isolate applications for further performance improvement, and a new TCP/IP stack that Sun says provides efficient communication processing.

McNealy said Solaris 10 is merely the latest in a long line of Sun contributions to the open source crowd.

"We're the number-one donator of code to the open source community on the planet," McNealy said. "To say that we need to be pressured -- we invented open source, gang. That's a little Al Gore-ish. The number one donator of open source code is (University of California) Berkeley. Know where all that came from? (Former Sun chief scientist) Bill Joy, who invented open source while at Berkeley with the BSD licence. We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix before Linus Torvalds was out of diapers."

McNealy took IBM Corp. to task for high OS operating costs. He said Sun could offer Solaris 10 at a price of US$1 per CPU, per hour -- customers would pay just a greenback for 60 minutes of access to the platform.

"IBM has

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