LCA2009: The third wave of open source

Sam Varghese
Friday, 23 January 2009 04:46

Opinion and Analysis

Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt.
That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.

Phipps was the third and final keynote speaker; much like the American singer Vanessa Williams sang, "they went and saved the best for last."

Phipps' talk was the real thing, a keynote by a speaker who knew his onions, one who could engage the audience, and also inject a much-needed bit of humour into his talk, both through the clever uses of some Dilbert cartoons and his own witticisms.

His message, nevertheless, was dead serious. Phipps, who is something of a futurist when it comes to technology, traced the first wave of open source back to the days even before the Free Software Foundation was set up, the time when IBM was in the position that Microsoft is now.

At that time, Big Blue was being investigated for its business practices and decided to unbundle its software from hardware.

Another force that drove open source onwards, Phipps said, was Bill Joy, one of the four people who founded Sun. (The others were Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vinod Khosla). Joy set up the BSD licence which freed software from some of its shackles.

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