LM: Just what was your involvement with Sun's Community Source License?

BJ: I was the instigator of it.

LM: Did you at any point evaluate the GPL for Sun's projects?

BJ: I can't license all of Sun's intellectual property under the GPL, because it just won't work. I don't see any reason why I should give somebody who's doing commercial reuse unfettered access to stuff that cost me millions of dollars to do. We're spending over a billion dollars a year in research. I can't just throw it all on the street. Not only because it's worth something, but because I'm not convinced people will respect its values -- the values I would want to see expressed in the way people used it.

If I make code available under the GPL, I'll lose control of it. The Europeans have this notion of artistic rights, and it seems to me an artist -- the person who creates something -- has some right over the ultimate use of what they do. Artists' rights also allow an artist to get paid on resale of their stuff later. My view is that programmers are like artists. I think there's got to be some economic reward back to the people who do the creative work that turns out to matter.

The GPL just doesn't solve my business problem at Sun. I would like all of our intellectual property to be available in source form, but I can't economically do that under the GPL.

In the object-oriented world [of programming], binaries are almost as usable as source because they have clean interfaces and boundaries. This whole thing about open source makes much less sense once you start talking about [object-oriented programming languages like] Java, except to the extent that people don't get the boundaries right.

LM: What about your original implementation of TCP/IP for BSD, which was freely available and which became the basis for a lot of the other implementations that are out there? It seems that from a compatibility standpoint, Java, for example, would have benefited from freely available source code in the same way TCP/IP did.

BJ: The top predator now is Microsoft. We didn't have a top predator back when I did TCP/IP. When you have a person with unlimited funds who is clearly focused on destroying the value proposition of what you're doing, you'd be a fool not to account for them in the strategy that you adopted.

LM: Do you feel that Microsoft might actually try to create Microsoft Linux in an attempt to fragment the Linux community?

BJ: The enemy in terms of fragmentation is usually yourself -- the people who know the most about making the software better. It's likely to be two separate groups that both decide that they're right and they're both going to make it better and just diverge. You've seen the history of the family tree of Unix. It's all over the map. It's certain to happen to the Linux tree at some point.

LM: Then why hasn't it happened already?

BJ: It has. Depending on what we'd say Linux is -- the kernel hasn't fragmented, but the distributions have. People's systems aren't the same.

LM: Do you think that the GPL discourages incompatibility by requiring people to make their source code freely available?

BJ: I don't see that it really prevents incompatibility. The only thing I know that prevents incompatibility is requiring people to be compatible. The GPL permits compatibility. It does not encourage it.

LM: Can you explain Sun's position toward Linux on Sparc? Sun seems to be supporting the development effort somewhat.

BJ: Right. Well, the customer's always right. If the customer wants Linux, that's great -- then we should give it to them. Sparc is the hardware that we make, and we're supportive of and very glad that people in the Linux community have done the hard work that they need to do.

We treat each of our divisions as entirely separate businesses, and I don't necessarily know what's going to be important in the long run. People have now figured out that companies that are a little more chaotic in this way actually are better adapters to environmental changes, and I think it's one of the reasons Sun has done so well. We don't try to get everybody signed up to one credo. We do not have one ironclad set of rules. We allow this kind of diversity internally.

LM: Sun is providing machines for Linux developers. What else is it doing to support Linux?

BJ: I don't actually know. I'm more involved in Java and Jini. The company's very large -- we have like 30,000 people -- and I probably get involved with about half of the R&D. The Solaris stuff I have the least to do with.

Sun wins if somebody has a Linux machine with Java because that improves the Java community. Sun wins if it's a Sparc. That's even better. To be honest, if it was Solaris, Sparc, and Java, that would be even better. But we're not infinitely greedy here.

The old Macy's model was if they didn't have what you wanted, they'd send you to the store that did, even if it was a competitor. If you come to us, we don't expect that we're going to solve all of your problems. You may want Apache on Linux on x86, and we'll do the best to operate in that environment because there may be some reason that's beyond our ability to affect that that's the right answer for you.

So to be customer-driven is to accept that and to contribute what you can. We just did this big deal with Apache to put more Java stuff in Apache. So we're coming at it from all directions.