News
Scott McNealy: "We Were the Red Hat of Berkeley Software Before Linus Was Out of Diapers"
"We Love Community Development," He Adds
Jun. 27, 2005 07:30 PM
From Scott McNealy's interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:
"We believe in community development. I'm going to sound a little Al Gore-ish here. But we invented community development at Sun.

Scott McNealy smiling at the SYS-CON Television camera moments before his JavaOne opening day keynote. (Photo copyright SYS-CON Media)
"Let me justify that because I don't think (Gore) justified his (comments about inventing the Internet). I think I can justify ours. (Former Sun Chief Technologist) Bill Joy, as far as I can tell, kind of pioneered the whole concept of open-source kernels at (Berkeley Software Distribution) and created the licensing mechanism. We brought him into Sun, and we were kind of the Red Hat of Berkeley software before (Linux kernel inventor) Linus (Torvalds) was out of diapers. So we've been doing this forever.
"We've been driving the Unix community forever. The Java community process, over 900 folks, 2.5 billion devices, 700 million cell phones, 700 million PCs, a billion Java cards, 4.5 million developers.
"We love community development. We'll leverage it. We think we can compete quite nicely -- and we have for 24 years in the open-source, open-interface community development world. I don't know anybody else who's done better, created a bigger cash pile.
"We're 16 straight years cash-flow positive from operations by being a community developer. Now, we don't have the Microsoft cash pile, but we've got an interesting one. I'm certainly not ashamed of what we've done over the last 24 years."

Linux Torvalds,
post-diapers
About Jeremy GeelanJeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide
Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV.
#4 |
Brent Emery Pieczynski commented on 10 Jul 2006
Was objective evidence found to show Linus did wear diapers during a time of immaturity, also who checked to verify Linus was not wearing diapers? It appears educated guesses were being made about Linus instead of, statements of historic fact.
|
#3 |
Brent Emery Pieczynski commented on 10 Jul 2006
Was objective evidence found to show Linus did wear diapers during a time of immaturity, also who checked to verify Linus was not wearing diapers? It appears educated guesses were being made about Linus instead of, statements of historic fact.
|
#2 |
Maurice Hilarius commented on 28 Jun 2005
Right, that's why sun dumped BSD in favour of SYS-V
|
#1 |
JDJ News Desk commented on 27 Jun 2005
Scott McNealy: "We Were the Red Hat of Berkeley Software Before Linus Was Out of Diapers" "We believe in community development. I'm going to sound a little Al Gore-ish here. But we invented community development at Sun.
"Let me justify that because I don't think (Gore) justified his (comments about inventing the Internet). I think I can justify ours. (Former Sun Chief Technologist) Bill Joy, as far as I can tell, kind of pioneered the whole concept of open-source kernels at (Berkeley Software Distribution) and created the licensing mechanism. We brought him into Sun, and we were kind of the Red Hat of Berkeley software before (Linux kernel inventor) Linus (Torvalds) was out of diapers. So we've been doing this forever.
"We've been driving the Unix community forever. The Java community process, over 900 folks, 2.5 billion devices, 700 million cell phones, 700 million PCs, a billion Java cards, 4.5 million developers.
"We love community development. We'll leverage it. We think we can compete quite nicely -- and we have for 24 years in the open-source, open-interface community development world. I don't know anybody else who's done better, created a bigger cash pile.
"We're 16 straight years cash-flow positive from operations by being a community developer. Now, we don't have the Microsoft cash pile, but we've got an interesting one. I'm certainly not ashamed of what we've done over the last 24 years."
|