PC World reports on a former Sun executive and the firm's FOSS strategies-

Sun Microsystems' push to open source all of its software helped prompt one vice president, Larry Singer, to leave the company, Singer said at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon.

The company has been offering up to open source crown jewels such as its Java platform and the Solaris OS. Singer, who was vice president of Global Information Systems Strategy at Sun, stressed that he agreed with a lot of the open source efforts, such as open-sourcing Solaris and Java. But he said he thought the company was over-emphasizing open source when it should have been focusing on generating revenues; he disagreed with new CEO Jonathan Schwartz about the effort and this was one reason Singer left the company in March after having been at Sun since 2003.
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"The hard part is we were spending all of our time and attention inside [Sun] on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company," said Singer.

He added he understood that Sun could lure new customers into buying its systems by extending Solaris via open source. But the return on investment from this effort could take 10 to 12 years, he said. "There's not going to be a company in 10, 12 years unless we get our revenues up in two years," he said. The company needed to focus on differentiation in core products, including workstations, servers and storage devices, to satisfy the big companies that constitute its customer base, Singer said.

No word yet on whether Sun's FOSS plans increased free culture or the freedom to tinker.