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Mitchell Baker (President and “Chief Lizard Wrangler” of the Mozilla Foundation) and Jonathan Schwartz (CTO of Sun), interviewed by Tim O’Reilly this morning at Web2.0

By a show of hands: I would estimate Mac users in the audience were about 30%, and about 10x the number of OpenOffice users.

Schwartz: Everything Sun does will be open source.

Everyone wanted us to announce that we are doing an AJAX office suite, but I don’t think that makes sense. The Google announcement is that we are working together. We are going to combine our distribution efforts. We could offer VOIP or a lot of things. Let your mind run wild. We could store documents and edit in a distributed fashion. We will combine distribution with technology. The power is in the community, in the distribution the product.

O’Reilly: If you have to advertise it, it’s probably not web 2.0

Schwartz: Developers don’t buy things, they join them. It’s a community not a marketplace. Transparency is a competitive weapon.

Blogging is a better use of time than 1:1 interviews. But I have certainly caused a few coronaries in the Sun legal department.

3 responses to “Opening”

  1. gdsanders Avatar
    gdsanders

    I liked Tim O’Reilly’s essay on the subject and wish I could have made it out for this one. The event seems reminiscent of Garage.com’s "Bootcamp for Startups" days of old.

    Reply
  2. Todd Huffman Avatar
    Todd Huffman

    Interesting on many fronts. How many nascent revolutions are being introduced here? Quite a few, and more if you start looking in the cracks.

    "The power is in the community, in the distribution of the product."

    Partially disagree, I think the community is the product. With distributed, social networked type systems, the technology is there to facilitate interactions of the community, because of the communities inherent worth.

    In the wikipedia, which is more valuable, the information in the wiki already, or the community base? Which would be harder to replace?

    On a commercial level, consider IBM’s open sourcing of Eclipse. A Java IDE isnt the product anymore, the product is a stronger and more cohesive group of developers. When you buy something from IBM, you dont just buy a finite set of technologies, you get a community.

    What is the community worth? A lot. You get a product which generates its own content, and content is expensive. The more people who buy the product, the more content it generates.

    Reply
  3. gizi Avatar
    gizi

    really nice. 🙂
    i’m a java developer, so this kind of pictures gets my attention!
    🙂

    Reply

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