Lem Bingley

In 1996 Scottish author Iain Banks gave a name to an interesting phenomenon: the outside context problem or OCP.

OCPs will be familiar to anyone who has ever played world-building games like Civilization or Age of Empires. As Banks puts it, "[Imagine] you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were peaceful and you were busy raising temples ... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailess and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, and he's keen on presents called tax."

As the name suggests, the OCP is a challenge that you tend to be ill-equipped to surmount.

Real-world examples include the arrival of Europeans in South America. Or grey squirrels moving in on red squirrels. Or, more to the point, the arrival of Linux. As Greg Papadopoulos, Sun Microsystem's chief technology officer, put it, "The whole software industry has to deal with this reset - of what open source is going to mean."

Sun, it has to be said, is struggling. It was doing very nicely competing against rivals like HP and IBM, until a large penguin paddled into view, propelled by people operating outside the normal context of capitalism.

Earlier this month Papadopoulos found his role suddenly expanded, as Sun chief scientist Bill Joy quit to spend more time with his home computer.

Joy was a Sun co-founder, with the firm for 20 years. He had a hand in Sparc and Solaris, and a substantial role in the creation of Java. He also kicked off the BSD varieties of Unix while still a graduate student in California.

Joy is also famous for writing a long and thought-provoking article in Wired magazine in 2000, called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. Not a comfortable read, it spelled out how the confluence of genetics, nanotech and IT could, in the relatively near future, create an OCP that might spell the end of the human race. Joy envisaged challenges ranging from voracious self-replicating nanomachines attempting to eat the biosphere, to super-intelligent robots deciding that people are an annoying irrelevance.

Joy postulated that a wilful decision to ignore some fields of scientific enquiry might therefore be a good thing. And he worried about his own body of work. "I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species," he wrote. "How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable."

Next to the demise of humanity, everything looks small and unimportant. But I wonder how comfortable Joy feels about what is happening to Sun.

With BSD, Joy pioneered open source Unix. And now the combination of Linux and Intel's commodity hardware is making Sun's core products look increasingly irrelevant.

Of course, Sun hopes to turn software change into hardware sales - this week's wholesale software rebranding, to highlight Java, is part of this strategy. But Sun's record of making profit from software is non-existent.

I sincerely hope that Joy is wrong about the future - as does he. But Joy's exit has taken away one very insightful mind that might have helped Sun find a way to survive its own OCP.

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