Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Open source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available
and may be redistributed with or without modification, thus encouraging collaboration, en-
hancement and the creation of new tools by third-party developers. Today, one of the prime
competitors to the
Microsoft Office Suite
is the free
OpenOffice
collaboration suite. Mean-
while, the Free Software Foundation advocates aggressively for distributions and adoption
of the free, open-source GNU/Linux.)
In many ways, Bill Joy provided much of the inspiration behind Sun's spirit of technical
innovation. "There are geeks and then there's Bill Joy - 49-year-old software god, hero pro-
grammer, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and, until he quit in September, its chief scient-
ist," wrote journalist Spencer Reiss in 2003. "Beginning in 1976, he spent zillions of hours
in front of a keyboard, coding the now-ubiquitous Berkeley strain of the UNIX operating
system; then he godfathered Sun's Java programming language and helped design servers
that were the Internet's heaviest artillery. In the early 1990s, he kept his job but bolted Sil-
icon Valley, 'leaving the urgent behind to get to the important,' he says."
In the spirit of
The Mythical Man-Month
, Joy to this day celebrates small systems
design, small programming teams, and small implementations. "I've always said that all
successful systems were small systems initially," he told Reiss in 2003. "Great, world-chan-
ging things - Java, for instance - always start small. The ideal project is one where people
don't have meetings, they have lunch. The size of the team should be the size of the lunch
table."
Joy's key mantra is innovation combined with leaps of faith. "If you look at the techno-
logy industry, you really have to believe in what you are doing and it needs to be great to
make a difference," Joy commented in 2010. "The time to have been bold was when there
was, perhaps, less reason to be bold, less apparent reason - right when Windows was cook-
ing. If you remember back when Apple did the Mac, the Apple II was doing really well
still. They had the Newton and it didn't work, so they haven't always succeeded, but they
have been willing to be bold." (Newton was an early personal digital assistant and Apple's
first tablet platform, which proved unpopular and was discontinued in 1998, in favor iOS,
used in the iPhone.)
Today, as both a technical innovator and an investor associated with KPMG, Joy fo-
cuses his efforts on business plans related to green technologies, education and pandemic
defense.
Finally, it is important to mention Cisco Systems. The firm was founded in 1984 by
Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner (a couple who worked in computer operations at Stanford
University) and Richard Troiano. Cisco started out as a purveyor of communications
routers, and quickly became the first firm to successfully sell commercial routers support-
ing multiple network protocols. As we shall see in a following chapter, with the eventu-
al wide adoption of the Internet Protocol (IP), the need for multi-protocol routines con-
