Sun's Simon Phipps on how companies can make money off open source.

Somehow, I am not convinced. It's all very well to talk of a subscription-based business model, but I don't think Sun can hope to gain a lot of revenue from something like the Java Desktop System (BTW, I consider Sun using 'Java' in a product that has nothing to with Java pretty despicable, but hey, it's their trademark). There are plenty of distros that already offer the goodies in the JDS [*]. May be I am missing something here, but I fail to see what differentiates Sun from other such vendors (other than the fact that Sun can call it the 'Java' Desktop System).

Simon goes on to say that "Sun's editorial view is to deliver high function, ease of use, data format and networking compatibility, low migration cost, re-use of existing hardware, escape from Windows viruses and security risks and minimal retraining." Nope, nothing unique here. If you remove Sun's name from the above sentence and replace it with, say, Red Hat's, nobody would notice.

[*] But can these vendors bundle a JDK with their distros?