For those who think that Scott McNealy (pictured) is out of the daily busy business life since he resigned his CEO position at Sun Microsystems, almost 2 years ago and after 22 years on the job .. well... think again... McNealy is all but retired!

I met with McNealy yesterday after his keynote at Sun's Worldwide Education and Research Conference (WWERC) at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here in San Francisco. And, inspite of retiring from playing hockey after a leg accident, McNealy was alive and kicking... and still very colourful! He decribes himself as being today Sun's top sales "rep" and evangelist and one of Jonathan Schwartz's, Sun's current CEO, coaches/peer.

"I'm Chairman of the board which is a non trivial job in this new day and age of governance... I've been in the pinata for 22 years and I know what he's [Jonathan Schwartz] going through and we spend a lot of time in email, chats and 1:1 conversations where he has somebody he could bounce ideas off over... There's no peer of the CEO in an organisation", McNealy said.

According to McNealy, the #1 nightmare for all companies is data breach and surprisingly not that applications may go down, that they might loose customers because they can't log in or even data corruption.

"When we bought Storagetek, people said, archives, storage, tape, how boring... And I said, you want to see excitement? Go in and tell the CEO or the CIO that you've lost their archives. Then you'll see excitement! You'll have to peel that guy off the ceiling!".

McNealy on open source, patent trolls

Regarding open source and patent trolls, McNealy revealed that Sun has gone through enormous efforts to detailed every line of code the company outsourced. And that's there's nothing better than open source with indemnification is the best of all worlds!

"We know the mommy, the daddy of every line of code... we have a complete dossier on every line of code that we write... so when NetApp comes at us we can get back at them with 14,000 line of codes to bascially say defensively... everyone of your products step on a big chunk of our IP... and that will hopefully warn the next "troll" they'd maybe not come after us!".

McNealy on Yahoo/Microsoft and the power of "destination" sites

"I'm not sure Yahoo is a driver of open source. Certainly Microsoft has not been on the leading edge of that... I will tell you that I've explained to every telco that either you become a destination site or the destination site will become a telco. And I told every bank that either you become a destination site or the destination site will become a bank... And there's going to be major consolidation in the number of destination sites and the number of carriers".

McNealy on JavaFX and how the phone is today the new user interface to connect to the Internet

"The phone is the new user interface... It isn't Vista or the Mac... This [the phone] is the new UI. The Nokia UI, the Blackberry UI, the Samsung UI..."

McNealy on last year's KKR $700 million investment

The investment from private equity firm KKR came as a total surprise last year but helped put aside concerns of Sun's long term viability.

"Now that we're spewing cash nobody's asking if Sun's going to make it. But a year or a year and a half ago... the press was parroting back what IBM, HP and others were saying... about Sun is not going to make it... But that kind of died down and I think in part because the KKR investment was a real PR value added investment and also gave us access to the KKR portfolio [like FirstData, Nielsen] to go sell technologies to".

2 things McNealy is happy about is: to miss is "staff meetings" and to reach 7th place at AT&T's ProAm this year!

"I have 22 years running staff meetings. I've seen every move. every faint, every mis-direction play and all the rest of it... I would actually anticipate the move and I could finish the sentence for the folks".