Sun's Jonathan Schwartz resigns with a Twitter haiku

As part of the early fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has resigned from Sun, leaving with a parting haiku on Twitter. (See haiku on Wikipedia.)

Mr. Schwartz struck me as an interesting CEO. He seemed like one of the first CEOs to post his ideas on a blog, and his strategy of trying to make Sun a more "open" company in an effort to save them was very interesting.

Frankly, I don't know what could have been done to save Sun when he took over ... I worked with several good-size companies, and they had absolutely no interest in Sun products.

Towards the end of my consulting career I did begin working with OpenSSO and Glassfish, and I'm sure we wouldn't have done that if those products weren't open, and more importantly to my clients, free. Therein lies the rub -- businesses will use your software because it's free, but how does your organization generate revenue from 'free'? Now there's a haiku for you ... or more like a Zen koan.