The Hindu Business Line : Sun animates Open Source software with $1-m transfusion

`Open Season': (From left) Mr Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Mr GlynnFoster, OpenSolaris Product Manager, both at Sun Microsystems, with Mr Joseph George,Manager, Revenue Product Engineering, Sun India Engineering Centre, at the Free andOpen Source Software conference, foss.in, in Bangalore on Friday. - Anand Parthasarathy

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore, Dec. 7 A transfusion worth a million dollars will waken even the most moribund to feverish activity. For the world’s Open Source Software (OSS) community, it might just make the difference between great ideas withering from lack of support to tomorrow’s canniest solutions.

That at any rate, is the avowed reasoning behind Sun Microsystems’ announcement on Friday that it had created a one million dollar corpus to be given away as grants every year to support initiatives in the Open Source arena.

Foss.in event

It chose to make the global announcement in India — during the annual Free and Open Source Software conference, foss.in, now ongoing in Bangalore — for a very good reason “This is where IT’s all happening.” Says Sun’s principal Open Source evangelist and Chief Open Source Officer, Mr Simon Phipps, “The Indian OSS community is one of the world’s largest.”

Unlike corporate-driven (and proprietary) software work, the Open Source arena is by and large, peopled by dedicated and committed volunteers. But with OSS products like Linux and its various avatars, increasingly entering the enterprise computing mainstream, “programming in Open Source shouldn’t be treated like a hobby”, Mr Phipps feels.

He was talking to Business Line soon after making his keynote presentation at the foss.in event.

“Sun has already spent close to $2 billion in supporting open source. Our annual grants to OS initiatives are around $230 million – now we want to reach out to the thousands of OS programmers who are not employees of Sun.”

Annual corpus

The $1-m annual corpus will be divided into roughly $175,000 chunks to fuel innovation in six OS environments created by Sun: GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris and OpenSparc. Invitations to participate will go out early in 2008 and the first disbursements will be made in the last quarter.

“The Indian community has been particularly lively in the Open Solaris area,” added Mr Glynn Foster, Sun’s UK-based OpenSolaris Products Manager. “There is so much energy here.”

Belenix

Mr Joseph George, Manager-Product Revenue Engineering with Sun’s India Engineering Centre, said: researchers here had created Belenix, the first bootable “live” CD-based distribution of OpenSolaris and a young programmer had even put it on a thumb drive.

The annual foss.in event attracts India’s best and brightest open source ‘premis’ as well as a number of IT companies who see canny common sense in supporting what might turn out to be the only way to go forward in software a few years hence.