Gingell: Some parts of it have already been open sourced. NFS for instance was open sourced a couple of years ago, and there's a project at the University of Michigan that does that for Linux based on our stuff. People--except for those who weren't born yet--lose sight of the fact that Linux is the latest version of Unix. The real key thing here is that there's always been a community around Unix. There hasn't been an intellectual property protection model that you can use as a flag like there is for open source.

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The thing I really see when I talk about open-source Solaris isn't open sourcing per se as much as [the fact that] this community operates by trading code with each other. That's the way we worked in the 1970s and 1980s, and it wasn't until when all the companies we worked for got into siege mode that we stopped doing that and even then, we still did it at some low-grade rate. Just about everything that started the Unix wars, which was based on AT&T picking Sun OS as the basis for going forward with Unix, everybody now has it. After the war was all done, they got it all anyway. So, you almost wonder what the war was fought about to some extent.

A lot of this is about ending isolation for one group of brains from another group of brains, which is nothing more than a residual effect of that balkanization period. It's certainly true that there's a window of opportunity where, if we [Sun] do nothing, [the Linux] community will eventually do everything we would have offered them. How much of that has already happened? Well, Solaris is actually the result of a lot of community work. There's a couple of hundred copyright holders to the material that's in Solaris and not all of them have agreed to operate according the Linux community's rules. We don't own it all. We don't have the ability to say, "This thing you gave us, we're now going to give away to everyone else." That wasn't the deal we struck.

The really valuable thing to us is this community. Not all predecessor communities have agreed to operate on the same IP principle that the Linux community operates on. Getting by that is a real impediment to throwing open the kimono and saying, "Here, Solaris is now open sourced." So, some of it has happened, and we are working on the rest of it. We may never be able to do it all because we may never be able to reach an agreement with the originators of the stuff. In short, the answer is that we're just sort of chipping away at it.

Tech Update: But what difference would there be between Linux by Solaris, and Linux?

Gingell: "By Solaris" is a reference to Team Solaris, which is an asset that Sun has that consists of about 3,000 coders.

Tech Update: But what would be the difference in the final deliverable? If, five years from now, I got Linux by Solaris, how would it be different from any other distribution?

Gingell: I don't know how to answer you specifically because, at any point in time, it will have to do with the problems that we worked on in the last two years that maybe nobody else worked on.

Tech Update: But it's an open source thing. You'll be beholden to contribute that back to the Linux community. Maybe you can do some value-add, but if you follow the same path that Red Hat just took, then we are right back to the balkanization.

Gingell: Earlier, you observed that we're talking about a commoditized space. So, all value-adds to a commoditized space are transient. Let's go back to the original part of Unix. Up until the mid-1980s, Unix operated according the same basic rules that Linux does today. So, why did Sun become preeminent in Unix despite operating under that rule? We became leaders of a community because we did more than other people that the market considered important, and we were effective, not just voluminous, contributors.

I maintain that the 1,000 engineers that are a part of core Solaris should retain that capacity. The capacity is invested in the team and not in the code. Part of open sourcing Solaris is a declaration--I'm overstating this--that I don't care about the code they finished. I pay them for the code they haven't written yet, about solving customer problems that we will be there to solve first--which is why you as a customer want to relate to the people that are setting the pace. The fact that you can get it from anyone else is true. You won't have to go see the movie day one. If we all wanted, we could wait six months to see Star Wars  for three bucks. Why did we all show up day one to pay ten bucks? It's because being first sometimes matters a lot.

Tech Update: So, do you believe that in the value-added Linux space, where customer problems pop up, you'll be able to solve them with Linux much quicker than anybody else?

Gingell: In this world where OS layers are commoditized, our capacity to do the engineering at the OS layer when needed will be better than anybody else's. That's historically been so. IBM's Unix efforts have been "laughers" in a lot of cases. They're the people that couldn't get [memory allocation] right, for God's sake.

Tech Update: So, you'll be taking on IBM here more than anybody else?

Gingell: No problem. Bring 'em on.

Tech Update: Red Hat is also very committed to that sort of coding capacity. They just opened a campus in Massachusetts and filled it up with nothing but programmers. Based on what you're saying, it feels like this is going to turn into a programming war.

Gingell: I agree, and that's cool. That's not a loser for us. Let's assume that I'm just the number two guy for this commoditized technology. Well, it's like being number two in transistors. Who cares? I'm gonna get it. If certain customers don't perceive that there's a huge amount of value there, the fact that I lose one or two of the battles doesn't actually matter.

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