TG: Sun has committed to releasing all of its code as open source. Do you think IBM will do the same?

IW-B: I don’t think so, because I honestly don’t think everybody wants to see all your code. Remember, the key to open source is not the ability to see the open software, it’s the forming of a community around it that will participate in its development and its maintenance.

You cannot go in your closet and look for old code and throw it out there and tell people to form a community around it. They may say, Irving, that’s legacy code that we have zero interest in working on. We continue to open source quite a bit of code, but we are fairly selective, and we work very closely with communities to decide whether to open source or not. (Guardian)

I think this second paragraph is misdirection, but nicely done – the highly paid corporate officers at Sun watched that zip over the plate, get caught, called strike, and tossed back to the pitcher before swinging wildly and falling over. More interesting, Wladawsky-Berger is thinking about the structure of corporations and the changes of the last 50 years.

The whole relationship between individuals and corporations started to change around twenty years ago because the old ways no longer worked.  Innovation and creativity are now needed more than ever in order to keep up with a continuing stream of technology and market changes.  Enterprises have had to become much more flexible and dynamic in order to survive the intense competition they started to face from companies around the world, large and small.  To do so, they have had to embrace a lot of the innovative entrepreneurship culture pioneered by VC’s and start-ups.

Similarly, individuals can no longer assume that just being loyal to a company will translate into a stable, orderly, life-long employment.  They are responsible for their own careers, and have to look out for their own opportunities. No matter how great a business they work for, they can no longer just rely on the company to take care of them.  Such a culture has much more in common with an entrepreneurial form of capitalism than with the corporate capitalism William Whyte wrote about.

This seems true and perceptive, as far as it goes. But if you read the blog of people at the other end of IBM’s changing business model you get another sense. “Entrepreneur” starts to sound a lot more like  Dickens and a lot less like Serge and Larry make a cool company.  The old corporate model depended on a social contract, that was stultifying, but the new model seems to me to depend on an unsustainable asymetrism of loyalties.  I wonder what Wladawsky-Berger really thinks of the stultifying and terrifying evaluation metrics that keep the company’s workers in line as the nimble behemoth sheds its high paid US staff.  One does not have to be in the grips of a nostalgia for the “organization man” days to wonder about the sustainability of a company that openly tells its workers and host communities that there is no social compact at all.

Well, it seems our friends at Sun have decided that their Spice^tm Enhanced brains are completely sufficient to create an entirely new – but far simpler, mind you – module system for the JDK.  Mark “I’m just a simple Guild Navigator” Reinhold has spent a number of blog posts doing the electronic equivalent of the Dance of the Seven Veils, culminating with revealing the aptly named Project Jigsaw. (from “Hal”).

Ok, so a barely disguised (“Emerald City” plus “House Harkonnen” – what part of XXXwood City could that be in ?)  snarky insider post on an absolutely classical dumb Sun move is now topical enough to reference. And it combines utter snarkiness with completely geeky references to a horrible sci-fi book and it is written by someone who calls himself “Hal”. Perfecto!

This reminds me of how years ago “L” who once worked for Sun calls up friends in the file system group to explain that tests are showing Solaris file system operation 4 or 5 times slower than Linux. Responses range from incredulity to boredom, but do not include anything as humble as “we can download and test”. Because customers are going to be so grateful for the brilliance of the core group, that minor crap like performance won’t make any difference.

And dithering on processor roadmap is silly. I saw a talk from a SPARC designer and asked why they had to dedicate so much silicon to some obsolete memory management nonsense. The answer, decoded, was that the Solaris team was too busy working on x86 to make even minimal changes for SPARC. If you are going to do something like that, you should probably drop the entire product.

Anyways, Sun appears to be following Digital Equipment Corporation and SGI down the track. Storied companies with brilliant engineers and technology, lead by people who don’t have much sense of how to make money with it all.