Were you the founder of the SPARC architecture?

What happened is Bill, even though he was really the software guy, became convinced in, I think it was 1984, that Motorola and the whole microprocessor architecture they were using, which was the 68000, was just not keeping up, or not taking advantage of what the technology could do. And after some interesting investigations, we concluded that we might as well design our own architecture, which was, for a small startup company, quite the bold thing to do. What was correct about this was it gave us a performance lead for many, many years, and then [we grew] the company to many, many billion dollars. So it was actually a very successful decision. Now, I was not involved in the original SPARC chip design. However, I was involved in the design of SPARCstation 1, which was really the first high-volume product around SPARC, which was a pizza-box workstation that was launched in 1989. And that was actually Sun's best-selling product for a while, and that was followed by the SPARCstation 2 and 10 and 20. And then I guess I got a little tired of doing all these workstations, so I decided there was a new opportunity in gigabit networking. But now I do see an opportunity back in the server space, and that's why I'm back here.

Do you think SPARC has much of a future at this point?

Well, it's the mainstream of the company. In fact, it's growing again. And the price performance and power efficiency of these multi threaded architectures is quite compelling. Now, having said that, it is Solaris-only, so it defines the Solaris market, whereas the industry-standard architecture of course runs Linux as well as Windows. From a volume perspective, the industry's architecture is way ahead. But we have a number of very loyal SPARC customers, and we don't see a reason to switch anytime soon, so we will keep investing in SPARC as long as that makes sense.

Would you say that Sun has righted the ship? I remember quarter after quarter after quarter where Sun was just getting bigger and bigger.And then during dot.com bust, Sun, like everybody else, slipped. Would you say that you righted the ship with the open-sourcing of Solaris and Java and that sort of thing?And also, what is your take on the open-sourcing of Java? I don't know if you ever actually publicly stated it.

I wasn't at Sun when the crash happened. From the outsider's view, Sun probably reacted a little too slowly to the change in business fundamentally. So the company would have been better off at the time to downsize more quickly. But that was six years ago, so that's neither here nor there. The open-sourcing of Solaris is actually going very well. There have been over 5 million downloads to date. We don't actually know what people are doing with all these downloads. It's kind of fascinating to see people in Pakistan and India and China and all over the world downloading this code, and something interesting is about to happen here, I would think, and the same about Java of course. So perhaps the company should have opened up these systems sooner, but nobody's complaining about the fact that it's open now. And it certainly has received very positive feedback from developers and other people who want to make either extensions or just understand how this stuff is working.

When you say positive feedback from developers, you're talking about Solaris and Java, or just Solaris?

Well, I want to touch on the Solaris side. Java, of course, runs on all kinds of platforms, such as Solaris. But I'm not with the part of the company that's working on all the Java things, so I can't really speak to that.... Open-source software has a compelling advantage because the potential customers know that there's a difference in openness with open software than with any kind of closed software. And more and more governments and companies decide that that's the right thing to do.