Gingell: Yes it is. Twenty years ago we added value to the world by integrating a bunch of components that were largely defined by the OSI [Open Systems Interconnect standard] and operating systems and things like that. Now, the world expects that as a given. It's not a differentiator or special thing.

So what is it that a systems company integrates in the year 2002 to create value? Mostly, it's integrating a bunch of components with IP addresses that deliver functionality.

The whole business around software stacks is really about functionality. All that business about creating Java and the Internet and so forth was a setup for building discreet [uniquely addressable] software entities that live on the net, and now is the time to exploit the fact that Java has been relatively successful. The Java developer base is an order of magnitude larger than our Unix base. We made a $12 billion business out of the Unix base. What can we make out of a developer pool that's ten times the size of the one we have for Unix? Well, I don't know if it's a ten-times larger business, but it's a bigger one.

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Tech Update: So, in a world where operating systems and processors are commodities, what differentiates Sun in a way that IT managers should be drawn to you versus other solution providers?

Gingell: Sun is the only company besides IBM that has the engineer resources and does processors, OSes, tools, and applications. That is true. We grow by building things that pursue the new Java apps base that we've spent most of the last decade helping to promote. We [Sun] are the last people standing except for IBM who can bring all those skills--an apps base, chips, ASICs, system software, languages, applications, and system buses--to a problem and create answers that employ all those skills. IBM doesn't seem to want to bring any one skill except for the services skill to the party, which is inherently a very costly approach because the humans are always more expensive than the parts.

If it's a war of humans, well, we're one-tenth IBM's size. It's like, "When did we want to get beat up?" would be the nature of the battle. On the other hand, if everybody has knives and daggers and somebody shows up with a Gatling gun, you don't need that many people to run the Gatling gun. That's an unfortunate analogy, but if you need that many people, technology always outdoes people in the end. So, as a products-based company, we are focused on what technological offering can we create that fills this picture.

Tech Update: You are now making a push in the Linux direction. As a part of Sun's brand equity, would it be a mistake to say there's a quality difference between Solaris and Linux?

Gingell: It would be a mistake, but I don't think that's what we're doing. Maybe I'm more radical about this, but I'm on record as saying I wanted Solaris open sourced. The reason I wanted it open sourced is that the Unix community has existed for many years. It's only been lately that we label it as the Linux community. It existed in the Bell telephone days in the 1970s, and the BSD days in the 1980s, and it got diffused in the 1990s as a result of a bunch of the balkanization--the Unix wars. But there's been an underlying community that contains all of the people that I know They're still hacking on OSes and for the most part, they're hacking on Linux because that's where the center of brainpower has moved.

Tech Update: Are you saying it's only a matter of time before that community gets Linux to the point where it's up to any task that Solaris is capable of? What is the rationale for open sourcing Solaris, rather than focusing on Linux?

Gingell: The consequence of the Unix wars was that all the elements of that community got fractionalized, partitioned, and balkanized. At some level, Solaris was sort of the winner. As a result we're the last remaining balkanized Unix. Our developers really don't relate to anyone else.

On the other hand, we've already done things that everyone else needs and wants, and it's sort of a waste of time to have everyone else spend the same millions of dollars and thousands of lives on doing scalability and that sort of stuff. So why don't we open source the thing and see if we can get the tribes to intermarry and re-accomplish this community thing? Maybe we call our thing Linux by Solaris or something like that.

The value of what we have is not really the code as much as it is the body of people we have who do the work we need done on a predictable schedule. That's always been the real value of the Solaris group. What we want are the qualities that we by and large invested in the Solaris code base to become a part of the bigger intermarriage. Five years from now when all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what's Solaris and what's Linux, and who's going to care? Nobody's going to care because, for the most part, we think they'll be running Java-based apps anyway. So the OS is a thing that gives you reliability and administrative power and things like that. But our real value is in having a group that can operate at the OS level in the applications stack.

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