JAOO Keynote

Keynote by Simon phipps- Chief Open Source Office, sun microsystems
One of the more disappointing keynotes to a software engineering conference I have had the opportunity to attend. It was, allegedly, about the "Zen of Free" - a sort of pseudo-paen to Open Source by the Chief Open Source office from Sun. I went into it a sceptic and despite some reasonable points being highlighted, the presentation and content was less visionary and persuasive than it could have been - or maybe there really isn't much of a story here anyway. two key points that stood out :
- The value in open source is not so much the community but the gatekeepers or the ubermenschen programmers who act as gatekeepers to new contributions and ensure quality. Good point and raises the inevitable question - where do you get this pool of developers from and what mechanisms does the community model provide for ensuring that the quality of the gatekeepers is consistent over time. My view is that ultimately good and innovative software gets developed by good developers - their collaboration model notwithstanding.
- Sun is putting half its money where its mouth is on Open Source - so a lot of rah rah about Open Sourcing Solaris. But they won't open source Java ( ie. the java runtime environment). Go figure.
An hours worth of standard half baked references to how Open source and the community process is the only way to develop good software now ( really !!) and gratuitous potshots at microsoft and SCO unix later - ended with what is going on in Sun at the moment. All in all a pretty flat talk.