Why does Sun need an evangelist?

An evangelist communicates a story that gives a model of the market. The model we use is the Net Effect—the observation that as the number of potentially profitable relationships on the Web increases, the way that you best harness that profit is by using loosely coupled, open standards.

How does giving away Star Office fit into that story? What's the benefit for Sun?

Open source is not about giving stuff away. Open source is an expression of the Net Effect—a massively connected method for a massively connected community. We now have a community of developers who get a win-win. They get access to code to do their own work, and we get access to their innovation and responsiveness to improve our products.

How will the Liberty Alliance universal authentication project differ from Microsoft's competing Passport?

The Liberty Alliance Project is starting with the desire to have single sign-on and specifying its mechanism later. Passport is about having Microsoft get the fibers of its dry rot into everyone's business and eating away at your customer base until they run it. They've done it with travel, they've done it with automobile retail, and they'll do it to your business too if you let Passport get between you and your customers.

There's been significant movement toward selling software as a service rather than a product. Is Sun headed in that direction?

What we profit from as a company is providing that stack of infrastructure that builds the Internet and builds the server service for our customers. We don't really intend to get into selling software as a service, because that's what our customers do. Unlike Microsoft, we don't compete with our customers.