LM: You're referring to the Jakarta project, where Sun agreed to donate its JavaServer Pages (JSP) and other Java Web server-related source code to the Apache project and have it released under the Apache license.

BJ: That was a local business decision; I'm glad that they did that.

LM: But you still have the same concerns about standardization, compatibility, and so forth?

BJ: Which I think the Apache community should have also. To the extent that Apache is a platform, and you want to have it be a healthy platform, you want the platform to be stable. But, I'm not opposed to limited cases depending on other licensing mechanisms.

I would always rather have a legal thing to fall back on to enforce compatibility. Think of contractual enforcement as sort of the right-wing approach, and community licensing as more left-wing. We've taken a step to the center. We expect in most cases the community to enforce compatibility, but in the limited case of a rogue, I want the ability to enforce a legal contract, because I don't see any reason why I shouldn't have that ability. In the left wing, amongst ourselves, we can argue about these things, but in reality, most of the commercial guys are so far to the right that we already seem radical by being in the middle.

It's innovation and sharing versus centralized control. It's basically the Romans versus the Greeks. That's what it comes down to. Microsoft is the Roman model, and the other people are basically the Greek model. That's the real root of it.

LM: Isn't that the same situation with Java? With Jini?

BJ: No. Because the Java source code has always been widely available. That's never been the issue. You can download it yourself. Even under the old license, we basically had a clickable license to download all this stuff.

Basically, we think that it's much better to work together than to not work together. That's not a very complicated value. Microsoft thinks: "anything you do, you compete with us." I think that if you don't necessarily like what we do, we'll find some other way to work together. There are not enough of us IT professionals anyway.

LM: Speaking of Microsoft, have you ever meet Bill Gates?

BJ: Oh yeah. Mostly in the eighties. I met him in the early 1980s.

LM: So would you consider him someone you know fairly well personally?

BJ: No. That would be a stale evaluation of him.

LM: So you believe he's changed?

BJ: I believe it's possible that he has so I can't speak to his current state. I haven't seen him since -- the last time I talked to him was probably five years ago.

LM: Is Linux the major force pushing against Microsoft?

BJ: I think Java is probably the major force pushing against Microsoft right now. I think Linux is a threat but Java's a bigger threat.

LM: Do you see Linux as a threat to Sun at all?

BJ: No. More Unix is better. Anything that isn't Microsoft is better. Anybody who buys a Linux machine has a lot better chance of buying a Solaris machine as their next machine or buying a Sparc machine running Linux or buying Java. The probabilities are greater for all those cases.

If I look at the graph of what percentage of customer dollars I'm likely to get next, it's much higher if they start with Linux than if they start with Windows. So in all cases, I'd rather win and get Sparc/Solaris/Java as the solution. But Linux/Sparc/Java would be my second choice.

LM: Do you know of a company named VA Linux Systems?

BJ: I met somebody who said they were working for them. I don't track the Linux community, though.

LM: What do you think about the business models being built around Linux?

BJ: I understand that people think they're going to build a business on the service model, but the truth is customers don't want to pay for that, so I don't get it. I don't know how it's going to work. People don't like to pay for service.

The whole proposition with Linux is that nobody can control the operating system. Some invisible hand controls it; a community controls it. Any individual company can't affect where it goes. How is everybody going to use this in a sense? The Linux companies are hobbled by it because if you say they can add value, then I say it's going to fragment Linux.

If you accept the proposition that they can't fragment it, then you also are saying that they can't really differentiate themselves. Because other than tuning it up a little bit, to differentiate would cause fragmentation.

I would argue that for most people the performance is going to be more than they're going to need anyway. I'm not sure performance differentiation is going to be that significant. So I'm not exactly sure how these companies will differentiate themselves technically.

LM: Have you ever considered making the Solaris source code more freely accessible?

BJ: Yeah. The difficulty is that it's got a lot of third-party stuff that's licensed under funny terms. So I think it will be really healthy for both the Solaris and Linux communities to work more closely together.

LM: Think that will ever happen?

BJ: It already is. We run a lot of Linux binaries, and we're trying to find ways to work together. Merging isn't a goal. I think Linux and Solaris have different goals. Linux is not worried about providing MVS class or VM370 or whatever IBM-class services for corporate data centers. That's not the center of the Linux community.

LM: But there are certainly areas of overlap.

BJ: That's okay. It gives people a choice, and that's not a bad thing, right? I still prefer to win. I'm not saying we're not competitive, but I'd still rather have it be Linux than NT. If there's two Unix choices and one Microsoft, that improves our chances.

LM: Do you think it's likely that parts of the Solaris operating system will be individually released as open source software?

BJ: I think that would be a good thing. There are logistic issues. You have to spend money to do that and it's hard work. In return, you get the value that the source code's available so the customer can become more self-reliant. I think self-reliance is a good thing.