February 8th, 2005
Damage control dominates Sun CTO's maiden voyage into blogosphere
With so many things going on at once for Sun Microsystems, it was only a matter of time before another Sun big gun was enlisted to help load balance the blarketing (blogs+marketing) that the company’s COO and president Jonathan Schwartz has so far been handling single-handedly. Enter, Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos — one of the company’s most respected thought leaders and clearly someone to whom, Sun is hoping, people will listen. In the last year, Papadopoulos has become most well-known for brokering the Sun-Microsoft detente with Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
To introduce Papadopoulos, Sun’s Schwartz proclaimed in his blog that the collective IQ of the blogosphere had just been raised due to his CTO’s entry. However, even though the blog is appropriately labeled "Greg Matter" to match his dense understanding of technology and big picture thinking, Papadopoulos’ initial entry was more an attempt at damage control (re: the flap over the open source license that was applied to OpenSolaris) than it was one of his enlightening technology chalk talks.
Rather than rehash what has already been said in defense of the CDDL by legions of Sun evangelists, perhaps Papadopolous should have offered us an update on the Sun-Microsoft relationship instead. After all, it was just last week that fellow Sun CTO and father of Java James Gosling was casting aspersions upon the recently minted relationship when he said that "In some levels, it’s actually meaning less and less." Between that and a public spitting match between Gosling and Microsoft’s Don Box over the security in .Net and Java, it sure would be good to hear from the lead negotiator what the new deal is. Or isn’t.
