We at Sun have been talking about open sourcing for quite a while now.  But not enough people seem to know how fundamental this is to our strategy.  Amazing given that everything that we are doing in software is in open source.  But I digress ...

The whole concept of open source seems simple.  Put you stuff out there, get others to work on it with you, and the result will be a better product, built faster and it will be better aligned with what the users / customers want.

That is it in a nutshell.  And it has been proven to work.  So why write about it in my blog?!?!  Well .... it is actually a bit harder than it sounds.  It is a new and different way for developers to work.  They spend time writing code.  But they also need to spend time building a community, answering questions and trading ideas.  Things that seem like a waste of time, but are at the core of why this model is productive.  More people are looking at the code, asking questions, making suggestions and thinking of new ways to use and extend it.

We have recently made some great progress with the stuff that we are working on - Open ESB.  We are doing more blogging.  Growin the number of external committers and contributors.  And the wide variety of locations that are involved is mind boggling!  Much of what we are doing is modeled after and an extended part of The Aquarium (Project Glassfish).  I am incredibly happy to see the progress and very happy to see the contributions coming in.

And just before the end of the week, we found out that two new bindings would be added.  Awesome!!