Samstag Januar 07, 2006

Do Desmond Tutu and Sun have the same dream?
My wife and I have a subscription of the weekly German newspaper "Die Zeit". My wife is commuting four hours per day by train and thus, unfortunately or fortunately, has a lot more time to read in the newspaper than me. The good thing about that is, that she always tells me about must-read articles she found. This morning, she made me read one again. Actually, she made me listen to it, since some of the articles are available as MP3 files as well.

The article I'm talking about is this one. The article belongs to a series of articles belonging to the column "I have a dream". In this case it's about Desmond Tutu's dream. As probably most of you know, Desmond Tutu is an archbishop and won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1984.

Tutu's dream reminds me very much of Sun's goal, even though Tutu's dream is much broader and definitely much harder, maybe impossible, to achieve. Sun's goal is to eliminate the digital devide. Thus, we at Sun try to connect every single individual on this globe and make her or him participate.

Tutu dreams of one large global family. A family that does not exclude anybody, but include everybody. I repeat, EVERYBODY!

Everybody belongs to this family: "black and white, rich and poor, smart and less smart, good looking and less good looking, people with and without disabilities, women and men, gay, lesbian and heterosexual people, just everybody, without exception".

In Tutu's dream even people who see each other as enemies would be members of this one global family.

As I said before, Sun's goal is to eliminate the digital devide, and I'm proud of that! The goal gives my job meaning beyond money!

If you are not sure what I'm talking about, just watch these public videos of Sun's Brand Summit last year. BTW, do a test, take a look at the homepages of Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, Novell, Red Hat, etc. and Sun. In Firefox it's especially nice and easy to do that via tabbed browsing. What is your first impression? What do you see? What do the different companies highlight on their homepages?

I don't know how much Sun will be able to contribute to the elimination of the digital devide in the long run, but announcements like the following one from February 2004 let me believe that the Sun-initiated and Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org project can actually help to bring people together:


"Today we have the pleasure to announce the opening of the Arabic and Hebrew Native-Lang projects. The Arabic Project (http://ar.openoffice.org) is led by Mr Khayat and backed by the Arabeyes free-software community, an important player and supporter of free software and OpenOffice.org in the Arabic world. The Hebrew project has been created by Tkos, an Israeli company who is also in charge of localizing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice but who managed to set up a real and lively community of users, developpers and marketers.

These two projects show the growing influence of OpenOffice.org in the Middle-East and we are delighted that such prestigious cultures and people have adopted OpenOffice.org as their free and open productivity suite ."
(Source)


The availability of OpenOffice.org in South Africa and India (read this, this, and this) also make me believe, that Sun together with the various (open source) communities can make a difference, can help to make this world a better place for us, our children, and their children. I belive that Sun can contribute to Tutu's dream of turning this world into one large global family, a family that does not exclude anybody, but includes everybody!
( Jan 07 2006, 06:41:14 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [2]