Brij’s One More Idea

I love Jonathan Schwartz’s blog for its direct, persuasive and provocative content. I wish more big company execs speak out their mind the way he does. In the latest post he articulates this nice pitch for the Sun hardware offerings (well actually it’s a  pitch for their  Grid offering !).  Its a very compelling vision. What was more interesting in the post was this section -

What happens to software licensing in a virtualized world? What’s a CPU
in a per-CPU license when the system you’re running has 32 independent
threads? An anachronism in my book. Can you imagine if MLB.com charged
by the CPU? That’s why all software from Sun, from the OS to the
middleware, will be priced by the "socket" or employee. We believe the
rest of the industry should move in the same direction.

This is interesting for several reasons. This is where proprietary software vendors will need to seriously look at their software licensing strategy.

New model gains as much from its own merit as much from the screw-ups of older models.  Open source components and most importantly VC-backed open source services startups are just building the critical marketing momentum.  They will (and they should) emphasize this point for the migration. I do and I am sure other open source services startups must be doing as well. 

(emphasis on VC-backed to highlight their dry powder reserve - useful resource when you are penetrating established market).

I think this strategy alone will cause more separation between Oracle (master of per-cpu pricing) and Sun.  Sun dropped few hints of going into the database market itself. Jonathan’s post reiterates that buzz -

That’s why all software from Sun, from the OS to the middleware, will
be priced by the "socket" or employee. We believe the rest of the
industry should move in the same direction

The curse of commodity is hurting everybody. Forcing Sun to go grid way and forcing Oracle to buy as many app vendors as they can.  One of these days Sun will start offering Postgres distribution ?