Kicking off the Aspen Summit on Sunday night, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz focused on his view of the key characteristic of the Internet Age - that it is an age of participation, in which the incredibly low costs of communicating allow everyone to chip in. Thus the reporting of major events now tends to come from people on the spot with cell phones and digital cameras, not from professional reporters, and software can be produced by widely dispersed communities.

One new Sun initiative to respond to this vision of the participation age is to make available an open source DRM program that will allow anyone to encade intellectual work without paying a toll to a patent holder.

A skeptic in the audience (me) noted that while this seems like a nice thing to do, it is hard to see how Sun makes money, or even gets compensated for the costs of maintaining this effort. After all, Linux may be open source, but the OSDL is funded to the tune of decamillions to keep it going. And Mozilla is seeking revenue models that will put it on a sound financial basis.

Jonathan dismissed the question with a quip that Sun has $7.5 billion in cash, so don't worry about it. But that is not an answer.

To some extent, his speech seemed like throwback to the Internet boom of lamented memory -- "hey, get a bunch of eyeballs and then we'll figure out how to monetize it." But a few companies, such as Google and Yahoo, are succeeding fantastically with precisely this philosophy. So the fact that it is now an object of derision in the press may mean that it presents an opportunity.

In addition, Sun is pushing hard on a vision of selling computing services as a utility, and the DRM initiative may fit well with that. (No links today because I don't have tabbed browsing, but a search of this weblog for Sun will find links to prior discussions of the utility approach.)

posted by James DeLong @ 9:09 AM | Software

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