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Jonathan Schwartz is a man on a mission. While at Linuxworld today, I took an hour to visit with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. After spending an hour prodding Jonathan with questions about Sun's history and future with open source, I was left with one clear impression:

Sun is rising, and open source is the driver behind its rebirth.

Jonathan is an executive who sincerely believes in open source as a fundamental business-model advantage, and not as a cheap complement to throw to the community in order to drive sales of "the real value." It's not a marketing gimmick with him. It's a strategy for winning. Jonathan, despite wearing a tie when we met, clearly understands the importance of community before commercial. Or, rather, he understands that community leads to commercial success.

As he stressed, the open-source battle is not between Red Hat and Sun. They are allies. Red Hat and Sun both want open source to succeed, and both want this phenomenon that started at the edge of the network to define the entire computing landscape.

And so I asked,… Read more

Although hyped for years, corporate adoption of open-source Java middleware is just starting to happen, says SourceLabs CEO Byron Sebastian.

SourceLabs on Wednesday released an updated bundled distribution, or "stack," of open-source Java middleware, adding Tomcat to the combination of Spring, Axis, Struts, and Hibernate (SASH).

These open-source frameworks have been popular with Java programmers for years because they help make them more productive. Now more companies are building applications on those components, rather than on proprietary Java application servers, said Sebastian.

"Is not as much ripping and replacing, but there's a huge pent-up demand for … Read more

BitLet is a handy service for downloading BitTorrent files without the client. Just copy and paste the URL of the torrent you'd like to get, and BitLet will fire up a Java-based downloader that lets you choose where on your machine you'd like to save the file. The whole experience requires no software besides your browser and the latest version of Java.

If you feel like sharing something to friends using BitTorrent, you can use BitLet to generate a link that will start up using the service. This means whoever gets it will be able to download the … Read more

How about a security patch to take that bitter edge off your Java brew?

Sun Microsystems issued a security update on Thursday that is designed to patch vulnerabilities in its Java Web Start application, which allows software for the Java platform to be launched using a Web browser.

The security flaws, described as "highly critical," were found in Java Web Start versions JDK and JRE 5.0 Update 11 and earlier, as well as Java Web Start in SDK and, on Windows, version JRE 1.4.2_13 and earlier, according to a security advisory by Secunia.

Sun issued … Read more

It's an amazing thing to build a piece of software that is adored on an industry-wide scale, but the Spring Framework fits this bill. My own company uses it, and I bump into enterprise users daily. It's an exceptional project.

The founder of the project, and the man who has since built a company around it, is Rod Johnson, CEO of Interface21 I talked with Rod to glean his expertise in building a successful company from a successful project in this twentieth installment of the Open Source CEO Series.

Name, position, and company of executive Rod Johnson, CEO and Co-founder, Interface21, the provider of the leading Java application framework.… Read more

This week in the Rafe & Tom Real Deal podcast: Silverlight. Real Deal fans sent some interesting and technical questions about the platform ahead of time, which Tom had good answers for. Check out the podcast here:

>>> Listen now <<<

Next Tuesday, we'll be discussing live streaming, and of course, we'll live-stream the recording session, at 3 p.m. Pacific Time next Tuesday. More details to come.

If you want to join the discussion ahead of time, head on over to the Real Deal forums or post a question here.

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems is trying to make the case at this year's JavaOne conference that its Java software is good for snazzy and elaborate desktop software. To give a taste for this concept, Sun showed off a Flickr-based photo editing site it calls Iris.

Iris--though either pokey or unable to handle the collective attention of the thousands of JavaOne attendees--lets Flickr members view their photos and perform a variety of editing tasks such as cropping, rotating, sharpening and blurring. Each image is shown with a histogram that represents the distribution of light and dark tones in the photo.

The … Read more

Interface21, the company behind the Java-based Spring Framework, said on Thursday that it has received $10 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital.

The funding will be used to expand the company's sales and support infrastructure.

The Spring Framework is a popular open-source tool for speeding up development of corporate server Java applications. Interface21, which makes money providing support and training around Spring, said that the framework is more widely deployed in a single Java application server.

Benchmark Capital has had a good track record of spotting successful open-source firms, having invested in Red Hat, MySQL and JBoss.

At JavaOne, Sun's James Gosling talked with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland about the new application platform, JavaFX. Gosling talks a bit about how JavaFX will compare to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

See News.com for more on JavaFX

If you're a Web user wondering what to do about this three-way race, here's my advice: don't worry about it, but do prepare to be impressed. The competition among these three powerhouses is going to make for fantastic new apps, as the platform vendors struggle to one-up each other by building their most … Read more