Open source is about very much more than avoiding licensing fees, Simon Phipps contends in his blog Open Source Nurtures Innovation. He argues cogently that absence of the need for an individual or a small group of developers to maintain code libraries (a must with proprietary software) frees writers of software to concentrate on new applications. In the world of open source, " ... instead of being solely responsible for the sustaining of every innovation they add, innovators can contribute their work to the shared code commons and have the sustaining shared by everyone," according to Phipps.
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Simon Phipps, formerly of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, now founder of the startup ForgeRock and director of the Open Source Initiative, recently addressed The Document Foundation's first LibreOffice Conference, where explained that Open Source as a movement does not require a "white knight" to foster and sustain it. Instead, he maintained. Open Source calls for " ... developers willing to collaborate, and a community willing to contribute both time and money." Fortunately, LibreOffice was brought about by the efforts of both factions.
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An independent organization called "The Document Foundation" has been formed by volunteers from the community developing and promoting OpenOffice.org to drive further growth of the free, open source office suite. A press release issued by the newly formed group states that Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand OpenOffice.org. In the meantime, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for the software.
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Governments globally are embracing open source policies. The White House moved its Web platform to open source this past fall with the goal of reducing costs and improving security. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., shares his views on why governments are embracing open source solutions, relaying six key reasons, and offers some guidelines on evaluating open source products.
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Sun is one of more than 70 organizations and individuals that have joined together to form a new coalition called Open Source for America that will promote the use of free and open source software to the U.S. Federal Government. Gartner recently estimated by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components or be developed as community source.
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