Sun Microsystems sent their CEO, and he’s clearly the best CEO speaker I’ve heard at a long series of these events. He speaks, teaches, amuses, and of course, sells pretty much continuously, and keeps to a schedule. Scott McNealy is clearly in touch with the real world. And he has made the transition to open source, completely and emphatically. He’s giving away Sun’s intellectual property, online, in-person, everywhere. Just before FOSE, he returned from a trip to China, where he told the Chinese government that he would provide, free, Solaris and Java software, and development help, and the Ultrasparc high-end processor plans, so that China could build their own hardware systems and provide automation services to their economy. He has made a similar proposal to Germany and some other countries–not all countries are ready for such a proposal, he says, with skills, but not enough technology already in place. Free.

His talk was all about Open Source; it would have worked just as well at a developer’s event as at government talk. His main point: Sun makes money giving away all their intellectual property, and then selling services and contracts. There are five public reasons he pushes open source. A sixth, unmentioned, is surely that expanding markets for open source expands markets for Sun Microsystems–they’re clearly a large enough player to benefit from that type of marketing.

1. There is no barrier to entry for users of open source products. Selling a prototype project to a corporate purchasing department shouldn’t start with requests for funding for software, just to see if what’s needed is possible. Just download it, and get started.

2. Increased interoperability. The source is out there, so there are no proprietary formats; every competitor is free to copy how you’ve done processes, and link into them, or add functionality.

3. More Research & Development. A closed source development project might have 5 programmers, or 30, working on it, he says. In open source, testing and bug fixing is open to a world of interested parties. It’s all extra help for the R&D staff.

4. More Secure. For the same reasons, open source is tested and hacked by the world before being declared as ‘done.’ There are no hidden secrets, it’s all out there to see, before deployment.

5. No barrier to Exit. There are no service-level agreements forcing years of product upgrades to future versions, site-unseen, and no site licenses in open source; there are no contracts to tie down a corporation or a government to continue using a product that’s last year’s bad news.

Sun is making money, lots of it. McNealy’ opening joke was that he stopped by Washington DC to pickup his $600 tax rebate check, and to deposit a few million $ for his 2007 tax bill. Open Source is clearly working for Sun–they claim to be the world’s largest provider of it, and they’re profitable even after spending huge amounts to defend themselves and their clients against software patent claims. They don’t start law suites over intellectual property, but they do defend, vigorously, and half their winnings go back to an open source legal defense fund.

Sun competes on the basis of providing service to clients. Their model sounds closer to that of a service company than to a software publisher. Scaling their model down to the level of a microISP is clearly challenging; some software developers are already working on the basis of custom installations and ‘whatever-you-need for a fee’ service. More will clearly have to work that way in the future.

McNealy closed by giving away a large stack of software CDs to every attendee, but remember that this is to a US Government audience that can’t accept gifts valued above $20. “It’s worth $8 for all the plastic. The content is available for free at developers.sun.com. I’m just saving you download time.” He doesn’t stop selling. Ever.

Written by Jerry Stern

Google sent the Vice President in charge of their Google Enterprise division for the first keynote address and slide show of the FOSE conference at the DC Convention Center. According to David Girouard, the future is in the clouds. Well, cloud computing. Yes, this speech was given on April Fool’s Day, also known as the 4th anniversary of the launch of GMail, but what he was promoting was the migration of documents onto the ‘cloud’ (storage on the Internet) and positioning Google as a SAAS vendor.

Those of you who attended the Software Industry Conference during the years it was in Florida around ten years ago will remember that SAAS, or Software as a Service, was really big back then, but it resulted in very little. Now, bandwidth and connectivity for business users is good enough and fast enough that SAAS may be practical for specific applications.

Putting documents into the cloud is already what Google is living on. All their documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, etc, are hosted live on the Google Apps site (www.google.com/a). Nothing is stored on workstations, and their technology now includes sharing of documents between collaborators, with tracking of edits and changes.

Girouard reports that lots of business notebooks are lost worldwide, usually with business data. He had one stolen from a parked car the day before a big meeting. The next morning, he stopped by the Google IT department, picked up a new notebook, switching to a Mac while he as there, logged in to Apps, and was up and running immediately, with less than half an hour lost.

This isn’t just Google eating their own brand of dog food. Girouard showed an impressive list of Fortune 500 companies that are using Google’s GMail with Postini spam filtering for 100% of their email storage. It’s all online, manageable and controllable by corporate management.

I’m back from my annual one-day jaunt down to Washington DC for the computer show formerly known as the Federal Office Systems Exposition. Now, it’s just FOSE, pronounced ‘fah-cee.’ You can get a good feel for what’s happening in the government computer markets based on what’s showing in the DC Convention Center.

This year, the main hall of the Convention Center was busy, but only at about 2/3 capacity. This show has never filled the new convention center–the old one was retired a few years back and two blocks south, and that one was always full. But this is a bigger building, and the show is smaller than it used to be. Actually, the show floor covers two city blocks, below ground, and if you go up to the registration area or up another floor to the keynote and conference rooms, it’s clear that it’s really two buildings. There’s even a DC Metro train stop at one end of the building, shared with Mt. Vernon Square.

For the last two years, the dominant items on the show floor have been removable storage devices with security features, and eGovernment systems for converting agencies with actual people into web sites with actual forms and automation. That’s progress in the US capital, maybe.

This year, regulations have changed regarding the destruction of personal data. And the US military is being more careful too. So, the item that wasn’t visible in previous years, that was everywhere this year, is demolition of computer hardware, shown by at least seven companies. First, there was a degaussing machine (OK, three different machines), that rotate a hard drive through a massive magnetic field. I fed in a hard drive, but there was no visible change–their demo didn’t actually show that the drive had lost all formatting, including servo tracks.

Degaussing isn’t visible enough for government use, apparently. They want to look at a device and SEE that it’s not readable. In the dark, apparently.

That means there was a vendor that sells a machine (with a hidden sound-muffled hydraulic compressor) that folds hard drives in half, the long way–it’s a clean 90 degree bend. Another had a hard drive destroyer that pushes a 2″ blunt cone down into the center of the drive until it becomes visible on the far side, shattering the platters. Again, it’s pneumatic, using a compressor.

There was another machine that folded drives, but electric or hand-crank operated for field use in a battlefield. There was a truck-mount hard drive shredder that reduces the drives to 1″ or smaller chunks–that one wasn’t on the show floor–it’s driven to clients for mass destruction of drives. And another portable device snipped the drives in half with a hydraulic claw.

Not to be outdone, another vendor had samples of what comes out of their computer shredder. Yes, the entire computer. But wait, there’s more… one supplier to the US government is actually doing it right–they shred the entire computer, grind it into fine dust, sort it both magnetically and by density into its component bits of metal alloys, plastic, gold, all the good stuff, and recycle it. They showed off clear containers of the various sorted powders.

So, your next appliance may contain 5% recycled US military computer parts and data. Guaranteed unreadable by the current level of technology.

Elsewhere at the show, there were the usual vendors, a mixture of the software companies you know, and the government specialists that build their offices around the edges of DC–locally, they’re called ‘Beltway Bandits.’

Last year, Google had a shared area in a small booth, showing off their hardware search technology that they install on client sites for searches of private networks–it’s called a ‘search appliance.’ This year, they had one of the largest areas on the floor, with seating for seminars in groups of around 50 people, and they gave introductory lessons on buying adwords, and showed what Google Earth could do for the military, and demonstrating the new real-time Google Earth weather alerts.

More tomorrow…