The Hindu Business Line : Sun Micro sees open source as way forward

Mumbai May 17 The co-founder and Chairman of Sun Microsystems Inc, Mr Scott McNealy, believes that sharing and free downloads of the company's software and open source platforms can help countries such as India bridge the digital divide.

Delivering the inaugural address at `Sun Technovate 2007', an IT industry event on Thursday, Mr McNealy said that when the whole world was entering a new age where everybody was connected to the Internet and software products were getting obsolete faster than ever, open source was the way forward.

Mr McNealy said that as technology was getting obsolete every 18 months, Sun had chosen to monetise open source platforms. Rather than litigate and protect its software, Sun had chosen to innovate and share it with the larger Web community, he said.

He said open source software could be delivered at optimum cost. "Companies that have developed their IT infrastructure and data centres based on propriety software have created a `Frankenstein', which does not allow the company to migrate to a new system. It breaks down regularly and it is very expensive to maintain," Mr McNealy said.

Energy-saving servers

He said electricity constitutes 40 per cent of the cost of running data centres. Therefore Sun is developing ways and means to create energy efficient servers, which will also take up less office space. The company has also started hardware based on open source. The new servers were giving breakthrough performance and high-energy efficiency. Some of the servers were using only two watts of power per thread, he said.

Sun, as a part of its education and learning community initiative, has also launched `Curriki' an Internet site for open source curriculum. The content is developed and supported by the Web community, he added.