Lecture: Open Wins – the Future of Software & Technology (Scott McNealy, SUN)
Dennis GuseScott McNealy the chairmen and a co-founder of SUN visited the TU Berlin on 06-11-08. He visited the university to give a short talk about open source software and why it became and will be a pushing element for technical innovations. Because he is with SUN the content of the talk was mostly about how SUN was, is and will be involved in the development of open source. The essance of the talk was:
- Open Source is good (not only code, also products and especially specifications)
- reducing the dependency between the developer and the user
- programmers improve their code style (someone else can read your stuff)
- Strategy of SUN
- He anwsered the question why SUN is doing open-source
Interesting points:
- Java
- happens transparently (ref: mobile phone and blue-ray players)
- is running on 6^9 devices (hope I got it right)
- Oracle Enterprise Edition costs 400.000 $ per core(!)
Cool quotes:
- “Free is the new black!”
- “Return on no-investment.”
- “Steal software legally”
- “We don’t want you to do .NET! Watch your hands!”
Provided links during the talk:
- Netbeans.tv: the community site of Netbeans.
- Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE): A developer edition of solaris with many tools
All in all I can say that Scott is a really good entertainer. It was a really nice talk! Thanks to Prof. Brandenburg for the information.