The Sun BabelFish Blog

Java Days in Paris: Open Source on the front stage

Open Source Software (OSS) took the front stage at Java Day in Paris, yesterday. Five active Open Sourcereres answered questions as to

• what their involvement with OSS was ?
• why they had embarked on OSS projects ?
• how it had helped them ?
• what the business rationale for going Open Source were?

This was followed by questions from the room. Now the five panelists, all members of the Paris based OSSgtP group, were not just minor contributors. We had

• Marc-Antoine Guarrigue: works on Jcaptcha a library to help tell humans and computers apart, which if very useful for online service.
• Ludovic Dubost: creator of XWiki, a powerful wiki server that uses Groovy as a scripting language.
• Guillaume Laforge: the lead on the powerfully Groovy scripting language
• Vincent Massol: author of books on junit and maven and contributor to maven, cactus and cargo projects
• Emmanuel Bernard Contributor to the Hibernate Project (and helping me out with so(m)mer).

The idea here was not to come up with a general theory such as the excellent article by Simon Phipps on freedom to leave but rather to ask some practical questions to some people in the field, to help others feel more comfortable about the OSS notion, by having real people do the talking.

So to take Ludovic Dubost for example, creator of Xwiki. Ludo pointed out that there was no way he could have built Xwiki without the OSS movement. There just would not have been enough tools around, and if there had been they would have cost too much money for a product such as Wiki to find funding for. What banker would have put money on a wiki tool? Just imagine trying to explain to them what wikis are for: "Dear Banker, we want to write software so people can openly and freely share information"... Xwiki uses every other technology of the panelists: It uses Jcaptcha to test for robots, Groovy for the scripting language , Hibernate for database access, and of course everyone uses unit tests, and build tools such as Maven or cargo. Ludovic also started his own company to provide wiki hosting and gets paid for support and guarantees, as pretty much everyone on the panel. But one can find one's interests in OSS in much simpler ways. Just participating is good. It helps meet other people, is an excellent way to get exposure to good ideas and good people, and often helps find a job. Well that's how I ended up working at Sun :-) And coincidentally also how Bill Joy got his job.

Posted at 11:34AM Jun 30, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in travel  |  Comments[1]