I went native last night to observe the Open Source community in preparation for when Java ME technology goes open source. I met Matt Hamrick, who runs the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. They had their monthly meeting last night at the TechShop in Menlo Park, Calif. where Matt Ettus gave a cool demo of his Software Radio technology and our OpenSPARC guys (Shrenik Mehta, Raju Joshi, and Steve Rudinsky) from Sun gave a talk on the OpenSPARC technology.

I tagged along to give any needed pre-launch info about our Java ME software going open source by the end of this year, in support of the OpenSPARC talk that Steve and Shrenik presented.

See:

Homebrew Mobile Phone Club Monthly Meeting

Matt Ettus in one part of his demo showed something cool that he told us in the audience we cannot blog about. Well, one thing I can tell you about that part of the demo is that we should be glad that the FBI and the NSA are probably keeping a close eye on Matt's technology. ;-)

OpenSPARC technology looks very cool too. Seeing our Sun CPU h/w out there under GPL is pretty different (scary!), but that is the direction that Sun is heading: opening all our technology to the open source community. Anyone can take our SPARC chip and put it in their homebrew computer or even homebrew cell phone or heck, build their own 1,000 CPU grid computer. It's getting lots of attention.

That's why we're also open sourcing our Java ME technology. Matt Hamrick says some Homebrew Mobile Phone Club guys like Python for their Open Phone since Java ME is not OSI-defined open sourced (yet!). But, we will be soon, so you Python guys should hold up and check out the entire Java ME software stack when it goes truly open source. There are lots more APIs in Java ME that can access the phone's functionality via our established open standards. Hopefully, we can work closely with the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club guys, since I think they will gain a lot when we open source our software. And, it will be free (as in homebrew beer and as in speech). :o)

Hinkmond