Sun has offered a frank response to the open letter from Eric S, Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative, in which he called on Sun to make its Java platform Open Source and described the company"s Open Source strategy as "spotty" and "confused". "I"d say this is 100 per cent rant," Sun"s Chief Technology Evangelist, Simon Phipps told us. "His simplistic accusations don"t hold water... If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I"d hate to see how it treats its enemies." Raymond"s first line of attack was to dispute whether CEO Scott McNealy"s claim that "the open-source model is our friend," has any substance when at the same time Sun is filling the coffers of Linux litigator SCO through licensing deals and still keeps Java under "tight control".
"It"s pretty difficult to respond to this. He"s so out of touch," said Phipps. "To even begin one must first address the error in his world view: He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community. "In fact, Sun has contributed more to Open Source than anybody else bar Berkeley [University of California]. We understand Open Source better than anyone else. IBM is just wrapping itself in the flag, but it still behaves like an old-fashioned systems company. Sun is actually taking the risks. [Raymond] isn"t well informed and is ignoring most of the stuff that Sun is doing. He completely ignores things like the Java Desktop, the Java Enterprise System running on Linux in its new servers. He"s very selective about what he wants to write about.