Ran across this article today, an interview with Lee Thompson who is VP of architecture at etrade. He talks about a whole series of events in 2001-2003 which succinctly describe the freefall that Sun found itself in as low cost intel-based servers and linux hit the sweet spot of sun's product line. It is particularly interesting for me to read, since I was responsible for the iPlanet software which etrade was using. In fact, etrade was one of the customers that helped make Java and app servers a mainstream enterprise software development strategy.

back after a lot of travel. just finished a discussion of what makes an open source company successful, and found one of the better summaries that I've seen in the Seattle paper. Here's the essence...

In order to choose winners, Sturiale said at the conference last week, his firm evaluates open source projects based upon downloads, community vibrancy, intellectual-property ownership and coherent business models. For him, those companies that simply rely on support contracts could run into problems

Like they say, the smartest statements are often the easiest to understand...