Jonathan Schwartz, CEO e COO da SUN, é um cara legal. Parece tá meio de 'saco-cheio' com toda a pressão que a Sun vem recebendo do 'mercado'. Ele mantém um blog (!), onde expõe suas idéias e opiniões. Saca só um trecho de seu último post:

"As you're well aware, there are several great application servers in the world, all adhering to a publicly available specification - BEA swept the market early on, and continues to drive some extraordinary innovation; IBM has made great fanfare of WebSphere; Sun has made its application server the backbone of JES, and free as the J2EE Reference Implementation; and of late, a few open source entrants have entered the field. There are probably 20 others I've missed - from Oracle, Borland, Sybase, JBoss, Pramati, many many others. And for any of these vendors to fly the "J2EE" flag, to use that brand as an assurance to customers, they must pass a common compliance test, contained in a Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). Fail the test, you can't fly the flag. That's how we preserve compatibility, and portability (which as you probably know, we're a bit touchy about).

So imagine you elect to move off Sun's app server, to move to IBM's WebSphere. To check to see if you've written to an instruction that isn't in the J2EE standard, you could have your development staff run our Application Verification Kit. The AVK tests to see if you've inadvertently defeated portability in your application. You'll soon realize there's nothing stopping you from moving off of Sun's app server to WebSphere - so you move the application over, and resume running your business.

If you think about it, industry participants are incented to enable substitution - if they impede it, they can't fly the "J2EE" flag. In this instance, the measurement of "open" is ultimately made by a customer swapping out one app server for another.

Where's proof? Imagine you come to your senses next quarter when IBM asks for a big license fee (did I mention Sun's app server is free on all platforms?); you run the AVK again to see if you're gotten hung up on any IBM "enhancements" that go beyond J2EE; and if the answer is no, you move back. Substitution is enabled.

Is the source code available? It doesn't matter - what matters is adherence to a standard to enable substitution. An Open standard, publicly available, for which a neutral test can be supplied (the TCK/AVK). If I failed the AVK, and had source to WebSphere, would it matter? No. I'd have to invest time and resources in moving, far more than if I'd stay faithful to J2EE. Open standards promote substitution, and thus competition. They are the standardized rails of the network - and the customer's best friend. "

A frase "It doesn't matter" ali no último parágrafo pode assustar umas pessoas. Cuidado! Leia todo o texto! Mas parece intencional. Qual a pergunta? "Is the source code available?". Importa?

Na forma que ele coloca, lógico que não. Para um "cliente", acho que não faz diferença nenhuma. Não diretamente. Mas quando uma "comunidade" pode ter acesso ao código, como temos testemunhado, o resultado é um produto de qualidade superior. São vários "programadores" voluntários trabalhando pela evolução daquele código, coisa que só é possível quando este é "Aberto".

Mas já bloguei anteriormente: a preocupação da Sun (e do Jonathan) com a integridade do padrão (Java, particularmente) justifica sim o excesso de zelo que eles têm demonstrado.