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We're involved in industry coalitions and grassroots initiatives that are building and strengthening the open-source community. In fiscal 2008, Sun became a member of the Linux Foundation and a corporate patron of the Free Software Foundation. We also extended our existing partnership with Canonical, a widely respected open-source company in the United Kingdom. And we worked with the BSD (Berkeley UNIX) communities to help them support Sun's older hardware, creating a Web page to stimulate collaboration. For more information, see .
Leadership
Open source has changed the software development business, and this altered business landscape can produce conflicts and competitive pressures. Sun has called for reforms in this area. Although the standards body maintains the definition of open source, only the copyrights for source code are clearly defined. Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, has called for the OSI to extend its work into areas such as patent law and trademarks. Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs at and president of the OSI, concurs, saying that a "standard's process is a crucial aspect of the standard's product, and a process that is not open cannot be trusted to produce a product that can be ."
During 2008, we added to our open-source credentials by buying several high-profile open source companies:
- MySQL
In January 2008, Sun bought the maker of MySQL, the world's most widely used open-source database. MySQL software is changing the database market, making the technology much more available to all. This acquisition confirmed our position as the largest commercial open-source contributor and put a billion dollars into the open-source market, "taking open source into the mainstream," according to industry analyst .
From March 2008, when Sun acquired MySQL, to the end of fiscal 2008, there have been more than 7.5 million community/open-source downloads of MySQL products.
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- innotek
In 2008, Sun bought innotek, a German open-source company whose free virtualization software, now called Sun xVM VirtualBox, is on par with market leader VMware. It allows the user to run a virtual version of almost any operating system on another machine or to test new code in multiple environments.
- Cluster File Systems
In 2008, Sun acquired the assets of Cluster File Systems, the company that created the for large-scale computing. We remain committed to the idea that Lustre must remain free software and are continuing to enhance the software across multivendor hardware platforms.
Supporting Developers
In late 2007, we announced the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program for developers. This program works to foster innovation and recognize the most interesting initiatives within Sun's open-source communities. We've selected six communities: GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, and OpenSPARC to participate in the first year. Prizes will be at least , and we'll announce the first winners in early fiscal 2009.
Sun India launched an open-source contest for students to coincide with the country's 60th anniversary of independence. The Code for Freedom contest ran from August 2007 to January 2008 and was open to undergraduate and graduate students in any college or university accredited by the Indian government. Sun invited contributions to five open-source projects: OpenSolaris, NetBeans, GlassFish, Apache Derby, and OpenPortal. The contest offered students the freedom to learn about and develop a wide range of technologies without the restraints of proprietary approaches.
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