Has Sun already started to reap the benefits of opening up this technology to the open-source community?
McNealy: Yes, it’s showing up with stronger gross margins, improved profitability, better growth, happier customers, and happier employees. We’ve been able to leverage our R&D and improve security in the products. Also, it’s resulted in better quality and better performance of the products. These are all good things. I’m not quite sure there have been any negatives other than I think we’re going to face more patent trolls. People like Kodak have already come after us on Java. And NetApps came after us on ZFS. As we open-source these technologies, the older, tired or insecure technology companies are going to try to use the patent hammer against the open-source community. That might be a downside, but we’ve got $6 billion of cash and we’re willing to take the hit. Do you think the patent system is broken? McNealy: That’s funny. Do you think breathing is good? Of course everything can be improved. Is the patent system perfect? No. Do I think patents should go away? No, but that’s a much
