Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux

InfoWorld - Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems Inc. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and chief technology officer at the Linux Foundation. InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena vs. Linux.

What exactly is Debian? Debian is a Linux distribution. It's the basis of Ubuntu Linux. I suppose the basic innovation of Debian was that it was developed by a distributed community, so we intentionally set out to build it in a distributed fashion, and it's one of the first open-source projects to operate that way.

Are you still involved with the Debian project? Not so much, but that's more of a function of lack of time.

Why did you join Sun? When I was in school as a computer science student in the early 1990s, I was a huge Sun fan. There were Sun workstations all over the place, and I wanted one of these more than anything in the world, and Sun was the company I wanted to work for. And when I had the opportunity to come to Sun and in particular bring some of my Linux experience to sort of a new set of challenges, I jumped at the opportunity.

What do you do at Sun? I see the OpenSolaris project seems to fall onto your plate. Initially, I was working on OpenSolaris and started Project Indiana, which culminated this week [with] the first version of the OpenSolaris binary distribution. These days, I am running the developer and community marketing organization, so I am responsible for marketing Sun's developer tools, the developer programs like Sun Developer Network and Tech Days Events, our open-source projects and communities. [Also, I do marketing for] StarOffice, OpenOffice, Network.com. So basically anything that relates to the developer community in some way, I run the marketing piece of that.

Is Sun completely open source with its software right now? Well, not entirely, but that's again mostly a function of how complex it is to take a piece of intellectual property that has not been open source and then moving it into open source. We are in the process of open sourcing all of our software, as [Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz] has said many times. But, for example, with Solaris there are still a few bits and pieces that have been licensed from other companies. We are working out the arrangements with those companies to be able to open source them.

What pieces are those? Well, for example, some device drivers [and] certain bits of functionality that were licensed.

I heard a former Sun official last year who basically said that he thought Sun was kind of moving too fast with open source, maybe overemphasizing it a bit. You're probably going to disagree with that, but how would you respond to that? I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything you could possibly need to put an application into production. So you don't monetize at the point of acquisition of software any longer, you have to monetize at a different place. So it's not to say that there is not money to be made in software, it's just made at a different place, and the different place is with all of the developers adopting technology, putting it into production, some of those applications that are deployed are going to be successful. They're going to run into the traditional challenges of having to grow and scale that application. They're going to need to have a relationship with the vendor behind the technology. So there are ample opportunities to make money because even though open source is free in the monetary sense, it still requires a lot of expertise and know-how to make it operate efficiently. So there's plenty of opportunity there to add value.