Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, was interviewed by Alex Serpo of ZDNet.com.au on the subjects of the MySQL acquisition and community engagement in both OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Phipps said the acquisition of MySQL fits well into the overall structure at Sun, where open source is now "...at the heart of the entire product business." It is still too early to pronounce the acquisition "prudent" because it is part of a long-term strategy.

"I'd say that from an organizational point of view it was an ideal acquisition; it was one of the best acquisitions that Sun has done in recent years," Phipps asserted.

Turning to the new release of OpenOffice.org, 3.0, Phipps expressed satisfaction with the 35 million downloads that have taken place since October 2008, adding that it is a positive measure of community involvement that some 50 new plug-ins have been introduced, also since October.

Given the complexity of the OpenOffice code base, the introduction of the add-on mechanism has made it possible to engage developer talent from the community at a most impressive level. Furthermore, Phipps continued, large enterprises have begun adopting OpenOffice.org 3.0 and creating the add-ons their respective enterprises require.

Phipps also mentioned the sizable localization effort underway with OpenOffice code, which is ongoing in at least 100 local languages worldwide.

"If you add up all the individual developers who work on the OpenOffice code because they have consulting engagement or small businesses, that sector is almost as numerous as the Sun developers who are engaged," he said.

"That makes it a very powerful force in the industry because it is able to go places with community engagement that proprietary software can't go," he continued.

With OpenSolaris, there have also been contributions from developers in the community. The complexity of the code in OpenSolaris is not as significant an issue as in OpenOffice.org, where there are numerous strong dependencies among the several parts of the latter solution. Few developers possess the oversight necessary to accept the implications of code contributions in OpenOffice.org, Phipps said, which creates a bottleneck.

In OpenSolaris that is not the case. "OpenSolaris is a very well structured and diffuse piece of code, where it is very reasonable to be able to have contributors," Phipps concluded.

More Information

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