One of the best blogs on the web today is written by Jonathon Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems – it is really worth your time if you are interested in how wikinomics and the Web 2.0 are changing the world. One of his more recent and informative posts on such topics was published on May 21st. It opens with a long discussion about the many ways online media has been trumping print media recently – and how print media is effectively fighting back by (among other things) focusing on community.

While interesting in it’s own right, the really good stuff comes when he goes on to talk about how this relates the software industry that Sun plays in. A particular focus is placed on how seven years ago everything was created by Sun’s own employees, with little or no community involvement, and how their biggest competitor in the late 1990s turned out to be a product built by a company that aggregated and organized open source software on the web. To quote Jonathon on how Sun reacted:

Could we have sued them? Sure. Sun has what I’d argue to be the single most valuable and focused patent portfolio on the web (and yes, we’d use it to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu, both). But suing the open source community would’ve been tantamount to a newspaper suing the authors of their letters to the editor. We would’ve been attempting to censor rather than embrace a free press. It might have felt good at the time, but it wouldn’t have addressed the broader challenge – community content was becoming more interesting to our customers than our professional content.

He then goes on to explain how Sun dropped prices for some products to free, made their code available, and “got busy engaging rather than fighting the open source community.” There are lessons here, and in how Sun is trying to grow, that every company can learn from – and particularly those in the media business. To quote Jonathon one final time:

And yes, I’m well aware that we have a long ways to go to return SUNW to its heights, and to get revenue and earnings growing more aggressively. But the best way for us to do so is to embrace community content, not litigate against it. Those that resist the transition to free media are valuing their patent portfolios more highly than their customers. And that’s not Sun’s business model.