Tim Bray and I hosted a discussion at JavaOne 2004 on the realities of open
source development for subscribers to Sun's Inner Circle Newsletter - mainly
CIO/CTO types from some of Sun's best customers, plus a few stragglers (an
IBM employee or two for example). It was a small, select, friendly but alert
audience, a pleasure to meet and an honor to present to.
A guest asked a question that often crops up; 'Sun is giving so much
source-code to open source (Project Looking Glass and Solaris the most recent
announcements), how will it ever monetize these donations - how can you make
money if you keep giving stuff away?' It's a good question. At its heart lies
a misunderstanding about the nature of open source software, and once that's
cleared up everything falls into place mu... (more)
"I'm convinced that the reform that's needed is a root-and-branch reform of
the very concept of the patent," contends Simon Phipps (pictured) in his most
recent Webmink blog posting (http://www.webmink.net/minkblog.htm). Today's
software patents, he believes, breach the social contract on which the
concept of a patent is based. SYS-CON reprints the blog entry in full here
with the permis... (more)
I've described elsewhere the idea of "swarms" - spontaneously federating
devices and software services connecting over networks. Some people are now
describing this concept as "wireless Web services," extending the group of
ideas now being called services-on-demand.
As usual, the computer industry is keen to address the details of protocols
and connections, but is leaving until later the ... (more)
WBT is pleased to showcase some farseeing comments on the emerging new
wireless Java world from our International Advisory Board member Simon
Phipps, who filed the following article - wirelessly of course - from the MS
Volendam (pictured here while berthed at Willemstad, Curacao), while happily
sailing aboard as a keynote speaker on a so-called "Geek Cruise."
We are fast moving to a world... (more)
In the last few years the focus in computing has gradually moved away from
the raw technology to settle on the total cost of ownership (tco) for a
solution. What makes up the tco? That's hard to say, and everyone has a
different answer, which usually depends on what they find easiest to fix.
Most people agree that the tco isn't simply the sum of the prices of the
parts that make the syst... (more)
Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, is a technology futurist and a well-known computer industry insider. At various times he has programmed mainframes, Windows and on the Web and was previously involved in OSI standards in the 80s, in the earliest commercial collaborative conferencing software in the early 90s, in introducing Java and XML to IBM, and most recently with Sun's launching Sun's blogging site, blogs.sun.com. He lives in the UK, is based at Sun's Menlo Park campus in California and can be contacted via http://www.webmink.net.
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