With communities becoming increasingly active in the software arena and the technologies and companies that create them growing more interconnected, a new trend is clear—communities have reshaped the software industry and from the looks of things, will continue to do so.
This was the key takeaway from Sun Microsystems president of Developer and Community Marketing, Ian Murdock’s keynote address that kick started CommunityOne on Monday.
In its second year running, CommunityOne is seen as the prelude to JavaOne-- Sun’s largest annual conference that discusses Java technologies.
Hosted at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, California, CommunityOne is a free one day event that debuted last year with the broader free and open source developer community in mind.
CommunityOne 2008 encompassed the theme “Innovate, Collaborate, Integrate”, attracting a diverse gathering of communities that includes students, developers and members from the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, GlassFish, Grails, MySQL, NetBeans, ODF Alliance, OpenSUSE, OpenID, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Python, Ruby and Ubuntu.
In his keynote, Murdock stressed that open-source and the communities form the core architecture of Sun’s business today and the systems company is working towards striking the ideal balance between corporate and commercial i.e. cash monetization versus code monetization.
Sun’s approach at the moment is to continue its commitment to fostering the open-source software and community model on one end of the spectrum whilst at the same time make available value added services such as extensions and plug-ins for a fee on the other end.
Such a bilateral approach, according to Murdock, is said to hit a win-win situation for both the company and the community.
The biggest announcement at CommunityOne came from Rich Green, Sun’s executive vice president for software. In his keynote, Green too the wraps off OpenSolaris—an open-source operating system (OS) based on Sun's Solaris kernel and made possible through community collaboration.
The new software, which according to Sun is an example of what the open-source model can accomplish, is a single platform designed for desktop, server and HPC deployments, enabling developers to quickly develop, test, trouble-shoot and deploy their new web services, HPC and network applications.
This capability aims to address the challenges faced by organisations today to keep up with the constant change in pace and approach with the different business models they deploy to remain competitive.
“..From a software perspective, it’s clear that open source is the right approach and that OpenSolaris provides the platform to participate, innovate and ultimately succeed…the new OpenSolaris OS sets the benchmark for what’s possible in an open source world,” said Green.
OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems in 2005 to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System (OS). There are some 100,000 community members registered on OpenSolaris.org to date.
Watch this space for more JavaOne 2008 news updates! |
