I attended (via webcast + IRC) the Sun Open Source Summit which was organized by the Sun Software CTO, and held at the Santa Clara Auditorium. It's a shame I couldn't be there in person, but c'est la vie (translation: it's not my day job, but I wish it were). I managed to attend all of the afternoon Auditorium tracks, including the Lightning Talks (which were amusing in their brevity). Talks were given on projects such as Rome, an open Atom/RSS toolkit for Java, and of course Tonic, which is upcoming Open Source Solaris. Of particular interest was hearing Joerg Shilling, author of cdrtools and star among others. Joerg is also involved with the Blastwave Community Software project, which I recently joined. Blastwave provides high quality, low touch Solaris packages for a wide variety of Open Source software</plug>.

The Auditorium also hosted several main sessions this afternoon which I was able to attend:

• Open Source Business Models

  “Charging money for access to source code is a tried and true way to make lots of money. But thanks to projects like Apache and Linux, more and more customers (including Sun customers) are demanding code access and a marked procurement preference for F/OSS code. Why is this happening and how will proprietary code producers make the switch to F/OSS while still maintaining profits?”

• Community vs. Control

  “In many ways creating very high-quality software is all about controlling the engineering environment, certainly what gets checked in and how changes are vetted. Sun's engineering process was designed to deliver proven results to our customers. Yet increasingly there is a competing priority of attracting and engaging communities of outside developers who may not have patience and discipline for the established process. We know from some of our previous projects with the F/OSS community that Sun Control is seen as a bad thing. We are told that giving up control will reap rewards, but what will it do to projects like Solaris?”

• Sun Lessons

  “This [...] session is a chance to share lessons learned during Sun's many experiments hosting or participating in F/OSS communities. Which assumptions were completely validated and which were so far off base that we had to regroup? How did we solve the challenges that came up? Which practices worked the best? What were the unintended outcomes (both positive and negative)?”

• Sun and Tonic

  “Tonic is the codename for Sun's OpenSolaris project. Another name we considered for this talk was "The Truth about Tonic". Moderated by Claire Giordano from Solaris. Come listen to DE Andy Tucker, engineering manager Karyn Ritter, community manager Jim Grisanzio, and senior staff engineer Bart Smaalders give an overview of the program, talk about why we are open sourcing Solaris, provide a status update, and answer your questions.”

All of the sessions were very well attended, and discussions usually ended with the F/OSS community members encouraging Sun to embrace open source, with full support of the community. There were so many informed, well articulated discussions, that I could not begin to summarize everything that happened during the afternoon sessions. I'll leave this to the real journalists -- primarily James Turner from LinuxWorld Magazine. This is a great time to be involved with Open Source, and a fantastic opportunity for Sun to win back hearts and minds in the broader community. I'm personally exited about the possible interaction between the CSW project and Open Solaris, so watch this space.