"We're halfway there": Sun on Open Source

Builder AU's Nick Gibson sat down with Sun Microsystems's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps to find out what's the fallout of open sourcing Java, what he really thinks about GPL v3 and why Sun is living on the prayer of Open Source.

Simon Phipps, who joined Sun in 2000, has been an industry insider for more than twenty years. He's worked on OSI standards, on XML for IBM and is now a major figure in Sun's drive to open source their catalogue of products. He's recently spoken at CeBIT in Sydney and last week's JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

During the video interview Phipps predicted the inevitability of open source in the near future, "I believe that open source is going to be come the dominant way that software is going to be created over the coming decade, piece by piece, and in different areas in the software industry, but within a fairly short space of time, within 3 to 5 years I think it'll be unthinkable to use software that isn't created in open source industries for most things."

Internally for Sun there's still a long way still to go, even with the latest release of open source Java. "I'd say we're about half way through the program of making all our software open source," Phipps told Builder AU

According to Phipps there are still some major challenges for the future of open source, in particular, the GPL V3 licence. "The opportunity for GPL v3 to be a uniting force between open source and free software, I think, has been eliminated," Phipps added.

To see the whole interview click play on the Flash video.