So you're in favor of the open-sourcing of Java?

That was definitely the right thing to do.... Keep in mind that when Sun started, Berkeley Unix was essentially the first open-source operating system because you would get a copy of the source code just by sending a US$100 check to Berkeley, which covered the cost of making a tape and sending it to you, right? In some sense, we should have kept that tradition all along, so the fact that Solaris was not always as open as it is today was basically a sort of mistake.

So can Sun still make money selling hardware and services even though the software is now basically free in many instances?

It's no different than Linux, right? Even though Linux itself is free, there's a cost for support and so on, and Solaris support actually, as far as that, is less expensive than a Red Hat subscription. So we are in fact competing with the Linux model.

What are you most proud of in the 25 years of Sun,and what is your biggest disappointment?

[There are] all the good memories certainly [of] the early days with the first Sun workstation, the first SPARCstation, UltraSPARC, and so on. All of these were major milestones that really propelled the company forward. And my personal involvement was by far the greatest with the SPARCstation series of products. Actually, really all the workstation products, but the SPARCstation really broke new grounds for the company in terms of just being a high-volume platform. One of the disappointments was that we didn't take advantage of the x86 architecture earlier. We should have done that in the 1990s certainly, not just a few years ago. But by the same token, there's ongoing innovation here, and it's not too late to re-enter that market.

I keep thinking back to something like Open Look versus Motif. Do you think Sun has been a rebel sort of company?

No, I think that's the wrong way to look at it. If you want to innovate, you sometimes have to throw things out and see whether you can make them successful. Because there's no easy way in advance to predict how exactly it will play out. Open Look is an example where something was not successful, even though we tried, we tried to give it away to the industry, but at the time, there was this counterforce called the Open Software Foundation, which was really the IBM, HP, DEC club to prevent Sun from growing, and whatever [we] were doing, they would oppose and do it differently. Now the Open Software Foundation, of course, wasn't successful either. There's nothing that remains from that. But the unfortunate thing is that what we were telling these other companies at the time was that the problem was Microsoft, not Sun, and they just didn't believe it. And a few years later that was more evident, but a lot of energy was wasted during that period of Unix companies trying to slow each other down, which really wasn't beneficial to anyone. But again, this was an industry matter of fact that we could just observe that not everybody understood open systems at the time, but I think it's clear now.