CRN: How is your relationship in the commercial application-server community? Do you see your competitors being nervous about your presence?
Fleury: I think there was a lot of nervousness about open source because our model, and I mean business models now, are disruptive to the industry. There was also a lot of ignorance about open source. I think what Linux is proving, and MySQL is proving, is that open-source vendors now, at the end of the day, are normal players, in fact behaved players, in an industry. And an industry doesn't evaporate overnight because you have an open-source player.
I'm really glad now that Sun has turned around with respect to open source. Now that we've paid our dues in licensing fees, we are a participant in that community. What we see from a lot of Sun employees is a warm embrace. ...
It's a maturity step for the whole industry, figuring out our business model, our company model and how we play with the others--and for the other companies to understand that open source is there, it's not going away, and [asking], how do we work with these guys? Good things are coming out of the collaboration. It's just a normal maturation of all the industry players.
CRN: What is your take on Apache and the opinion that some have that since Apache runs a tight ship and has a model in place where they ensure compatibility with their implementation, that that might be a good place for Java to reside?
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