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.

In recent weeks, Sun Microsystems GC Mike Dillon and CEO Jonathan Schwartz have been blogging about their company's IP battle with Network Appliances, trading barbs with NetApp co-founder Dave Hitz, who has been commenting on the case on his own blog.

Sun Microsystems has become its own free software foundation, open-sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open-source MySQL database for $1 billion in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue.

Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM's Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.

In the beginning was... hacker culture and free Internet software. They existed as outsiders. They were really known by few. But some knew of them and an idea started to grow... it was first only in one person's mind, then two, then it spread to the hacker culture and further into the business world.

I know we are all riveted on Utah today, but take a moment, please, because this is important. Jonathan Schwartz, formerly CEO of Sun, has a personal blog, What I Couldn't Say ..., where he has begun to tell us what he couldn't tell us before about events during his tenure there.

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer had the idea to make a coffee table book about coffee tables? I always thought that was a pretty elegant idea. Well, a few months ago, some of the smart folks on Red Hat's community architecture team had a similarly elegant idea:

Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation as CEO of Sun Microsystems in a message sent via Twitter early Thursday.

GNU guru Richard Stallman sent me an e-mail the other day complaining that we erred by saying that the Free Software Foundation, of which he's president, promotes open source software. "We have never supported the idea of 'open source' because that idea denies the importance of users' freedom," he writes.