December 5th, 2008
Open source and circling the drain
General Motors insists it needs cash now or it will go bankrupt, and once that filing is made it’s game over, because no one will buy a car from a bankrupt.
Given the market’s reaction to Sun’s JavaFX announcement, I am thinking it’s already game over.
Sun is not bankrupt. But it is steadily weakening. Just a few years past a reverse stock split to boost the price, the stock is back at those pre-split levels.
Stock is how we measure the health of tech companies, unfortunately, and to many this means “A Hobbled Sun Limps to the RIA Starting Gate” or “Layoffs Be Damned.”
Maybe coders are more financially ruthless than car buyers. Maybe Sun’s problem isn’t Java at all, but the fact that it’s tied to a hardware business being systematically taken apart by Moore’s Second Law.
(For those few unfamiliar, Moore’s Second Law holds that as chips get more complex they get more expensive to develop, thus weeding out competition over time. Right now it’s more relevant than the main Moore’s Law.)
Java needs to either be spun-out or sold into stronger hands.
In Silicon Valley parlance Sun is about as popular as Charlie Weis, the embattled Notre Dame coach given an unexpected year’s reprieve recently.
It’s hard to win developer loyalty, no matter how good your code, if everyone assumes you’re circling the drain and are likely to disappear down the line. Until the long term future is dealt with, Sun’s just giving open source a bad name.
This tells me that Java needs to either be spun-out or sold into stronger hands.
And it may be too late for GM as well.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 12/05/08
