As promised last week this is a short review of the Sun Microsystem’s Event about “Web 2.0 and Open Source in Startups”. First: This event was more for founders and managers than for developers. And you could clearly see this. Most came with a shirt or suite. Neither Mathias, Christian nor me had a t-shirt with text on it. And this happens almost never 🙂
In general the event was about the efforts Sun did and does in the Open Source world. The most surprising fact was a finding by the European Commission that Sun and MySQL are the biggest contributor of work and man-hours in a general GNU/Linux distribution.
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You can see, Sun’s effort is almost 4 times as big as IBM and 6 times as big as “Open Source” Red Hat.
Even Richard Stallman recognizes Sun’s importance:
I think Sun… has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It’s an example I hope others will follow.
Gilles Gravier also mentioned some other Open Source to which Sun contributes:
- GNOME
- X.org, before the login prompt, most of the lines to boot are from Sun
- OpenOffice.org, bought Germany based StarDivisio and made the office suite free and open source.
- MySQL, bought for 1 billion dollars.
- Mozilla Calendar, completely integrated into Sun’s Exchange alternative. Sun brings 7 of the team of 14 developers.
- OpenSolaris
Gilles told that OpenOffice.org 3 will be under the GPL 3, instead of te LGPL 2 a the old OpenOffice.org versions.
What do you think are the main reasons for companies to use MySQL Database Server? Low costs and flexibilty, says Adobe, Nokia Siemens Networks, Discovery Financial. Big companies are looking at Open Source software and so should your startup!
Brad Wilkinson listed some of MySQL’s customers, like Google, GoDaddy, Adobe, Toys’R’Us and more. In a side note he mentioned that Facebook has 9000 (9k) servers. Not that much for the worlds seventh biggest website, according to Alexa.
If you are a startup, you DEFINITELY should take a look at the presentation by Patrick Liechti. Sun has some great features for young startups! They offer up to 60% on Sun hardware.
You can download all the slides from Sun’s website.
As a little goodie, I have an opensolaris Live CD and a Sun pen! Let me know if you would like it. But please promise to really use it!
It is good to know that Sun cares about Open Source, even the top managers, and that they support the growth of it. They also see the importance and need of it. And it is awesome to see geeks can get great jobs in worldwide companies 😉
Finally: I think I now have the ultimate buzz word t-shirt 🙂
My photos are available on Flickr. Some are here as well.
