With rumors of a takeover by IBM swirling around him, Sun Microsytems’ chairman Scott McNealy tried to pitch a room of customers this week on the idea that Sun is a wily innovator whose software and hardware are far less costly than proprietary solutions from Oracle and, yes, IBM. But McNealy had little to offer loyal customers with Sun’s legacy Sparc hardware.

McNealy touted Sun’s vision of cloud computing and the folly of “best of breed” to about 200 customers and partners. “Frankenstein was best of breed, and every time he keels over, IBM comes in with $100,000 shock paddles,” McNealy said. Sun’s goal “is to get you out of the kitchen. We build data centers; you do whatever you do,” adding that “building a data center out of 40 different parts is last year’s strategy.”

Sun’s McNealy touts open source, bashes Oracle and IBM

The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, which would amount to about $4 billion once Sun’s cash and marketable securities are taken into account. On paper, the deal could make some sense: adding Sun’s server market share would give IBM more clout in its competition with Hewlett-Packard, IBM would get some software and intellectual property assets, and that price would be a nice premium for Sun shareholders disappointed with the company’s sliding stock price.

Is it a bad idea for IBM to buy Sun? | Business Tech – CNET News

Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government — particularly Linux and Sun’s own products, Solaris and Java — McNealy believes many government officials don’t understand it, fear it and even oppose it for ideological reasons.

McNealy cited an open-source development project that Sun worked on with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during which a federal official said “that open source was anti-capitalist.” That sentiment, McNealy fears, is not unusual or isolated.

Sun’s McNealy: Some federal officials see open source as ‘anti-capitalist’

Well, during China’s national science and technology conference on Feb. 9, the Chinese government started a new plan to accelerate the local economy through science and technology. In the next coming 11 years, the Chinese government will invest US$85 billion on technology innovation, including information industry, equipment manufacturing, energy, water, medicine and agriculture. The director of software and service division at MIIT (Ministry of Industry and IT) also mentioned that some of projects will be related to open source software in the China Open Source development summit hosted just one month ago in Beijing.

Right time for China to use open source as alternative | ZDNet Asia

Speaking to the BBC, McNealy said that he doesn’t want to see government getting “locked in” to a specific vendor or company. By choosing open source, government can “get higher quality software, lower costs” and “higher reliability.” The fact that much open source software is made available publicly, is licensed royalty free for unrestricted use, along with an open code source for all to see, makes the freely available technologies and products a good choice for lowering costs and improving security. By keeping it open, anyone can help it to improve and adapt, while fixing security problems.

Sun chief prescribes open source for US government | heise online

In an effort to reduce rising government IT costs, the Obama
administration could turn to open source software. Sun cofounder and
former CEO Scott McNealy says that the Obama administration has asked
him to prepare a paper that will address this topic and provide
guidance on potential open source adoption strategies.

An odd choice to help government with open source strategy | Ars Technica

The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Calls for open source government | BBC NEWS

There have been no shortage of nods toward the new President’s stance on openness: Blogs especially have been quick to point out his weekly YouTube videos, www.whitehouse.gov’s creative commons license, or the site’s metaphor-rich robot.txt file. But this request of Mr. McNealy sounds like something that could be used to develop a substantial plan of action for government-funded technology. Certainly a more open approach to US technology would be a good thing. To quote Mr. McNealy:

“The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability — all the benefits that come with open software.”

President Obama: Good for Open Source? | Linux Magazine