NewsForge: Sun Explains Open Source at EclipseCon

“Simon Phipps, formerly an IBM employee and for the last two
years Chief Technology Evangelist for Sun Microsystems, gave his
EclipseCon keynote address Thursday. As you might expect, he took
exception to a couple of remarks from Wednesday morning’s keynoter,
Michael Tiemann of Red Hat. Phipps’s talk was on ‘The Business of
Open Source.’ It was interesting, almost a
through-the-looking-glass experience, to hear a suit from Sun stand
on a stage and try to explain open source to an audience of mostly
proprietary developers. It should be noted that the ballroom where
the keynote was given was not far from Disney’s Fantasyland.

“Phipps credited the Internet for creating the massively
connected world required for open source to flourish. He quoted Bob
Metcalfe on the importance of networks being dependent on the
number of connections it makes rather than on the number of nodes.
Metcalfe, you may recall, enjoyed referring to the ‘open sores’
movement…”

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