Sun Microsystems looking for big change

When thinking about federal technology, the chairman of Sun Federal, Scott McNealy, tells FederalNewsRadio it really comes down to three elements:

• Are the interfaces open
• Is the implementation published and available to be inspected, and thirdly
• Is it high volume.

And there's no doubt how McNealy feels about it. "We're all for open source and high volume standards. We think the market needs all of those."

For two reasons, he says: it's more efficient and safer. "Knowing how it's built allows you to port it to other hardware, to interoperate with other applications, and to modify the technology and if you don't have the source code, you can't do any of that."

Making changes, for example, is more efficient when the wheel doesn't need to be rebuilt.

Lots of governments internationally have jumped on the (open source) bandwagon for security issues, for cost issues, for speed issues and most importantly, for what I call "barrier to exit issues." The biggest problem of IT is that it has the shelf life of a banana. Before you can implement it, and certainly even before governments can procure it, it's like two or three generations old according to Moore's Law. By the time you develop, test, certify and put (it) into production you're now talking about something that is four or five generations old.

And as for cybersecurity, McNealy says it may be counter-intuitive, but open source means flaws can be fixed more easily.

The dirty little secret about open source software is that it's safer. If you have a secret in your code, which proprietary compiled code has, somebody will discover it and then you'll have a breach because humans can't keep a secret - they're good at discovering - and if you have a big secret, you're going to have a guaranteed breach. Now, open source, from the time it gets created through the development process, through the deployment process and through the ramp gets looked at by everybody. Any breaches that exist will get discovered, will get patched... Take Java - on the open source platform is on 6 billion devices. I challenge you to name a Java virus.

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