Kevin Bedell recently had the opportunity to talk with Sun Microsystems' John Fowler about open standards, Linux and Java, and Sun's contributions to the open source community.

John Fowler is chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems' Software organization. He manages an Advanced Development group and reports directly to Jonathan Schwartz's organization. John has been with Sun for 12 years, with experience in software development and most recently corporate strategy.

Prior to this appointment, John led technical strategy in Sun corporate, identifying leading technology trends and the companies creating these trends for minority investment and acquisition. John's group took a forward view on both hardware and software technology developments, identified companies that are complementary to Sun in specific areas, and sought to invest in these companies.

Prior to taking the technology position in the corporate group, John was director of engineering for the Sun Software Development Tools organization. Over the past 10 years, he has held a variety of positions, primarily engineering management, in Java Software, Solaris, Unix Desktop, and Graphics.

LWM: Thanks, John, for speaking with us. Being the CTO of Software at Sun Microsystems seems like a broad-ranging job. From my understanding of Sun, the big software initiatives happening there right now run around Java, Solaris, and Linux. What's your particular area of focus?
John Fowler: We're really focused on extending the ability to develop network applications through every part of the network. We believe that people are developing applications today that span from the data center, where your systems information is, all the way out to the identity card. So we have developed Java with partners to actually provide a network architecture for developing applications through the entire computing universe.

LWM: I remember the first time I encountered a Sun product, it was actually a Sun 3 Workstation based on a Motorola processor, and it was running BSD (Berkely Unix) 4.2.This was some number of years ago, but I remember that even then the idea behind Sun was the mantra of open systems…is that still where you're going?
Fowler: Yes. As you know from our early history, we picked up the Motorola 68000 processor and BSD and created the workstation. We've always been about taking some standard and open components and putting them together in particular ways to create solutions for customers, and so from the early, humble workstation days of open standards and workstations to today, a lot of these basics still continue to be the same. Open standards, an open development environment, and a combination of standard components and integration to build a solution. With Java we really look at the network as the system, that is, you develop applications today to really live on the network, and that's what Java and Web services enable you to do.

LWM: Speaking of Java and Linux...it seems that Java is now becoming the language of choice for enterprise development. I know a lot of people talk about C# being a growing language, but one of the biggest trends that struck me recently was that COBOL application development is finally beginning to fall off. I take that to mean that these big applications are finally being rewritten, and they are being written in Java for the most part. Is that what you're seeing?
Fowler: Yes. There's been a trend over the last few years where we've gone from a multiplicity of languages and development environments to two major ones – C# and .NET from Microsoft, and Java and J2EE from Sun and Sun's partners. So most new enterprise applications development is done in those two areas. The basic difference is actually very straightforward. With Microsoft .NET you can build applications that can live in one environment – that is Microsoft Windows; and with Java and J2EE you can build applications that span many operating systems, hardware platforms, and other environments. So your choosing something involves an entire industry as opposed to a single company.

LWM: That sounds great. So how does that story play out with Linux?
Fowler: Linux is a wonderful opportunity for Java because Linux is developed to live on many different hardware platforms. Java itself requires some kind of operating system to give it a runtime environment, and Linux provides a wonderful operating system that spans many hardware architectures; it's on dozens of microprocessors, and in many different form factors from small personal computers to PDAs to desktop computers to large mainframe computers. Linux gives us an operating environment where we can run Java applications that span the entirety of hardware that's available today.

LWM: In the end, what do you see as the benefits of that for people trying to build enterprise applications?
Fowler: People building enterprise applications in Java already benefit from an industry, so it's an open movement to build Java and runtimes that are available for many people. Linux amplifies this because with Linux you get an operating environment and hardware choices that also span many different companies. So what does that mean for customers? You get the freedom of choice in terms of the partners that you can work with, the ability to migrate applications if you should so need, and you also get standard capital competition that drives innovation between all the different people developing infrastructure technologies.

LWM: When you look at what your customers are doing, are a lot of the new applications being developed in Linux? What trends are you seeing?
Fowler: We see a lot of people moving applications to Linux. It's a major trend. And then as they start to build new applications they build them using Java and Web services. This isn't about building applications for Linux; this is actually building applications for Web services. They typically develop for an application server and a portal server environment, and then where they go to deploy it is where the operating system choices come in. So when we talk about new applications development, we're not talking about applications development in Linux, we're talking about applications development in Web services and Java. Linux becomes one of the opportunities to deploy these Java Web services apps costeffectively.

LWM: It sounds like those two things, Linux providing the ability to deploy on any hardware you want, and Java and J2EE providing the ability to develop enterprise applications on Linux, mean that you can build anything and run it anywhere, I guess. Is that right?
Fowler: That's right. I mean part of it is being able to run it anywhere, and another interesting trend that's happening with Linux and Java is that there's a great growth in the number of developers who actually use Linux desktops as their development environment. Evans [Evans Data Corporation – ed.] did a survey recently where they showed the percentage of developer desktops, and there's a clear erosion of the number of desktops running Windows versus the number of desktops running Linux for people doing development in Java. So the interesting thing is that for the developers, with Linux they get the power and the stability and the security of Unix, and they get the flexibility of lots of different tools of an open environment, and they get it at a very low cost, and so developers more and more are choosing Linux as a development environment, not just as a deployment environment. We expect that trend to continue and Sun is trying to accelerate that trend as much as possible with community programs; with our tools availability on Linux, which has always been available on Linux from the beginning; and with other activities to really encourage the developer on Linux.

LWM: I'd like to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about Sun's contributions to the open source community. I know that there are so many companies that are now using Linux, but I get the feeling that a lot of them are really taking from the community without contributing back.What has Sun's role been from that perspective?
Fowler: Well it's good to start with a little history. You reminded me of the workstation days, and in the early days of the workstation we actually obtained tapes from Berkeley and we modified the Berkeley systems distribution and contributed those changes back to Berkeley. So from the very beginning of the inception of the company we were founded on open source. With respect to Linux, it's important to remember that there are a number of different components to a specific Linux distribution – there is the kernel plus all the activities that are around it. We are, of course, the major contributors of OpenOffice, and we contribute very significantly to Mozilla and GNOME. We're part of the inception of those programs, and we have programs around grid, SNMP, and JXTA and Jini – those are all open source programs that are largely motivated by Sun. Other open source programs that we contribute heavily to include Apache.org, where we contribute Tomcat work. So we're active in communities that we begin, we're active in terms of the technology we incorporate into our own products, and we're active with communities that we contribute to. So we're very much both give and take as far as our open source activities.

LWM: That's great. A couple of last questions: What do you see as the possibility that someday Java itself may become open source?
Fowler: Well, right now we're really focused on standards with Java so I think when you look at open source, open source is a development methodology by which you make your source available. You have to look at your licensing model, your ability to create standard and compliant applications, and then how you actually develop that software. Today Java's about an open standard for how we develop it; it's about compliance to binary compatibility so that we can run applications everywhere. That's how we're currently pursuing the evolution of Java.

LWM: Are there any plans for a Sun distribution of Linux?
Fowler: Today we're going to be talking about Mad Hatter, which is our Linux desktop effort, and Mad Hatter includes a substantial amount of technology developed by Sun together with partners to go in the desktop arena. So today we're really focused on the distribution area, on the desktop. In the server space we have joint development distribution agreements with both SuSE and Red Hat. These are not straight OEM agreements, which other manufacturers have done; these are joint development agreements by which we're actually enhancing Java and other applications and systems so that when you get Linux and you get it from Sun, you know that you are getting the best possible development and runtime environment and the best support.

LWM: We really appreciate Sun's commitment to do that. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?
Fowler: I think it's really important for everyone to get out and work on enhancing the open source tools and using them, OpenOffice and GNOME, and the Linux distributions...I think it's a participatory economy and I want to really encourage everyone to go and participate.