From Scott McNealy's keynote at Linuxworld: "I am a capitalist and am not ashamed of that. One of the ways that we will go make money is selling hardware. I have not seen the open source equivalent of downloading a server over the Internet."
UPDATE: I wanted to revisit this post to note the duel significance behind the quote from Scott NcNealy.
1) Many open source conspiracy theorists seem to forget that Sun (and other companies like them) are capitalist ventures and not academic consortiums or communes of ideological enlightenment. Scott McNealy's comments in a recent interview have been overblown and are more likely to be off-the-cuff unfiltered thinking on his part. One of life's early lessons that I hold dear is that actions speak louder then words. Sun has been one of the most generous commercial technology vendors to the open source community and continues to work with and support that community while balancing its responsibilities to its shareholders -- and its licensees.
2) McNealy's comments continue to reinforce that, as a capitalist, you can make money with open source -- it probably won't be directly though. Sun is a hardware company. Their hope is that the open software brings more value to its customers and drives more hardware sales. Through these hardware sales they will generate revenue (and soon profits once again) that allow them to continue to support the open source community. (Joel Spolsky articulates this point well in his essay "Strategy Letter V".) To this same point hardware and services cannot be open source or free. They have different economics that requires significant up-front and on-going investments in revenue. I believe that increasingly over time, standalone "shrink-wrapped" software companies will get squeezed out of existence, into a small niche or a supporting revenue channel such as hardware or services. Witness Microsoft's battle to discredit open source while eyeing a switch to subscription based services like the sidelined .NET My Services (Hailstorm) initiative.
