"1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;

2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;

3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it."

"The tricky bit with this model is that it is too hard to make enough $ to justify all those engineers. Why? If the code base is commercial quality (a given with Sun), deployers often don't need your services or add-ons to scale. They can figure it out themselves, or only a small fraction of deployers will scale big enough to need extra help. Or the community just builds a free alternative add-on.

The real Sun model, which could work, but is seen as unpopular with analysts and investors and people focused on everything "paying its own way", is that ubiquitous software platforms driven by potent open source development and deployment communities creates "opportunities to monetize" hardware and services - aka "drag". You still need racks of humming machines to run all that free stuff. Sun's challenge: deliver hardware and professional services that run the free stuff with better ROI than anyone else's gear. Then, figure out how to account for the drag, so that the software strategy of creating ubiquity and mass adoption gets credit for dragging all that hardware along, and the credit justifies all those engineers.

- rms | @richsands"