I visited India last month and learned a great deal about what happens when a country embraces open source as a matter of government and economic development policy.  From drug discovery to open innovation to healthcare and education, open source is being used and applied in innovative ways in India.

On my last day there, I visited a government hospital in Chennai (or Madras as it was formerly known).  It was a Saturday and the queue for services was long but not nearly as long as it used to be.   The best way I can describe the method of care was McDonald's (and I don't meant that as derogatory).  Patients stand in line and when they get to the doctor, they describe theur ailments and the doctor prescribes medications.  The patient then goes to the pharmacy at the hospital and picks up their medication.  Very efficient because it has to be; they see thousands of paients every day.  Of course, they have hospital beds and separate care faciilities for more serious problems.  The government hospitals are the primary care providers for a high percentage of the Indian population. 

What's new is the application of information technology to the patient record management process.  It was literally 'all paper' until just a few months ago.  You can see in the pictures I took the computer terminals being used by the doctors.  The benefits to the patients are that their average wait in line has decreased significantly.  I heard that a full day could be required in the past to see the doctor.  Now it's down to few hours at most.  Another benefit is better inventory control of the medications and less shrinkage of that inventory.  Finally, there are better healthcare productivity metrics possible, not to mention improvements in quality of service by having better information on hand at the point of diagnosis.

Myself, I had to get a physical this week as well as a stress test.  I had to go on two separate days because of insurance policy.  All of the records are kept in paper files that the doctors scan through.  Granted, I only waited a few minutes and the visit lasted for 30 minutes each time but I couldn't help to wonder if the patients in these Indian hospitals might not be receiving better care because their doctors have access to better information than my own.

This is the motivation for improved information management of health records in the U.S.  It's part of the new economic stimulus package.  With these systems we can lower costs, improve quality of care and lessen the amount of time we spend as patients in filling out forms and negotiating payment processing.

Next up, I'll talk about a cool thing I discovered one our employees in India is helping to drive: The Open Source Model as applied to the drug discovery process.

No, I haven't just returned from "the Valley", but The Open Source University Meetup (OSUM) is the latest great idea in Education at Sun Microsystems. OSUM is a social networking and learning site aimed at bringing together students interested in open source software, whether it be learning, sharing or using open source developer tools and platforms. In a society where students are acclimated to using social networks to find friends, how better to bring them together with like-minds interested in MySQL(TM), NetBeans(TM), Java(TM), GlassFish(TM), OpenSPARC(TM), OpenSolaris(TM) and more. Beyond just a social networking site, OSUM helps students to connect in person through on-campus meetups and events, coordinated by our very adept network of more than 500 Sun Campus Ambassadors.

The results are amazing. Or simply "OSUM". Within the first two months of the launch, there are already 20,000+ members in the OSUM community. Students come to discuss everything on the site, high tech to networking. The students are sharing their interests, their code and their lives. They can use the site to find solutions, answers to their project challenges and even jobs. This is the backyard barbeque and work water cooler wrapped into one and I invite you to check it out.

I mentioned in my May 19 blog post that I visited Fudan University on my recent trip to China. Before too much time passes (and my memory fades), I want to write about my experience there. The university is a Sun customer, so they gave me a tour of their datacenter. And let me just say that I was blown away.

Now, when I visit customers, they routinely take me on these tours. And as you might expect, computers, tape drives, raised flooring and other datacenter features look pretty much the same from datacenter to datacenter, no matter where you are in the world. So when I was escorted into Fudan University's datacenter, my expectations weren't high.

The first thing I noticed was the large bank of monitors. Half were monitor systems for network activities; highlighted in red, like a giant traffic map, were any problems in the thousands of computers that Fudan has spread across its campuses and that are all managed from this central location. (The university IT staff wrote all the monitoring software themselves using open source software.) The other half of the monitors show feeds from video surveillance cameras aimed at the key computing assets around the campuses.

My guides opened the door to the main computer room to proudly display the Sun systems that run the university. They then took me through another set of doors so they could show me massive banks of batteries or UPS systems that protect the main computer room in the event of a power outage. They explained that the computer center actually has power feeds from two different power plants, and they showed me the two massive breakers.

Then my guides did something I've never seen done before: they shut off the breakers to give me a live demonstration of the UPS system working. (After this, they opened one more set of doors and I half expected that they would open into the power plants themselves, but instead it was the fire suppression system room.)

In the end, it was not only one of the most sophisticated datacenters I've seen at a university anywhere in the world—it also rivaled many of the corporate datacenters I've seen.

While I was in Shanghai last month, I was fortunate to meet with some of our Sun Campus Ambassadors. These are full-time students who we hire as interns to learn about Sun technology and conduct evangelism, research and special projects throughout their academic year. We also ask our ambassadors to blog about their work; you can read some of those blogs here. Here's a blog written by the Chinese Campus Ambassadors who are "experts" in areas such as Solaris or NetBeans. These students serve as a resource for their fellow Campus Ambassadors, and use blogging to share their experiences, post tips, and write about aspects of Sun technology.

The best thing about interns, be they full- or part time, is the energy, enthusiasm and fresh perspective they bring, and the insights they can offer into things we may be missing out on in the day-to-day grind inside a company. Our Campus Ambassadors in China are no different. They pointed out that given their knowledge of technology and multi-language skills (both technical and spoken), we should be
giving them even greater challenges to pursue.

For example, Project Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is an ongoing research project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories that gives developers a platform for inspiration and innovation on the device side. In November, the Sun SPOT Development Kit topped the list of InfoWorld's
must-have gadgets for IT pros and technology lovers. We've give a Sun SPOT Development Kit to every Campus Ambassador so they can learn about it. They're also learning about Sun Labs' Project Wonderland, a toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual world.

The Chinese ambassadors I met with pointed out that they were some of the only people in all of China that were learning about both of these technologies. They think they could help us make these technologies more successful in China and the world, if for no other reason than the fact that they could help in the translation and creation of documentation and training in Chinese.

Their main message was that they want even greater challenges than what we've asked of them so far. That's a problem I'd love to solve.

Sun has long held that today's student is tomorrow's developer—and in many cases, today's developer as well. We've put our money where our mouth is by giving away our software, including the training that goes with it, to student developers at no charge. More about that in a moment.

We understand that such tools and training are an important piece—but just one piece—of an overall academic program. The field of computer science isn't about tools alone. Tools change. Languages change. Java didn't exist 15 years ago. Does that make a Computer Science degree granted before 1995 invalid? Of course not. So it's good that Microsoft is making a first small step at making their developer tools available to college students at a subset of universities around the world (although it's too bad that high school students still have to go through their teachers to get these tools). It's a good thing, because it better equips students to compare proprietary development tools with open source alternatives.  It may even result in the improvement of open source development tools.

But for the rest of the world—including high school students—Sun is more than happy to provide our robust set of tools and training for no cost. We've been offering our Free and Open Source tools to developers, including all student developers, for quite some time now. Our Academic Developer Program gives student developers free downloads of Sun developer tools like NetBeans, Java Studio Creator, Sun Studio and Sun's most innovative and popular software products for academic use. Of particular interest to a generation brought up with video games, we recently even open sourced the Project Darkstar environment for creating massively scalable online games, as well as the Project Wonderland toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds.

We've been sharing our source code for years. Sun open sourced over 10 million lines of code in 2005 with the OpenSolaris project. (The Solaris Operating System is also supported on over 900 x86 and SPARC platforms.) The OpenSPARC project is making the hardware source code of the recently announced UltraSPARC T1 processor available under an Open Source license. Those are just a few of the many projects to which Sun contributes. And of course there's Java, invented by Sun in 1995. Java has become the essential ingredient of the digital experience for hundreds of millions of people in all walks of life, all over the planet. Sun recently released the source code for Java Platform Standard Edition, Java Platform Micro Edition and Java Platform Enterprise Edition under open source licenses.

Of course, simply providing tools is not enough. You have to provide training, too. Through the Sun Academic Initiative, schools become authorized to deliver training on Sun technologies to their faculty, staff, and students. The Sun Academic Initiative also offers non-profit academic institutions access to free Web-based training and curricula, including courses in the latest Java and Solaris technologies. The initiative gives students at more than 3,000 institutions around the world a competitive edge as they enter the workforce.

Sun also collaborates with universities throughout the world to bring open content to market. For example, the Java Education and Development Initiative (JEDI), a collaborative project with the University of Philippines, aims to make high-quality, industry-endorsed IT and computer science course material available for free.

Sun collaborated with the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and Deakin University in Australia to develop BlueJ, a free Java IDE specifically designed to teach object-oriented programming with Java. BlueJ recently celebrated more than 3 million downloads. Project Greenfoot is a new development environment aimed at bringing programming into high schools and university entry courses by making it easy to build graphical interactive applicaitons such as games and siulations. Again, it's freely available.

Companies should not charge students for development tools, training and community, or make them only available on a limited basis. The Participation Age calls for inclusion and investment in the next generations to foster innovation. The open source community and Sun have been doing this for years. We're glad that other companies, like Microsoft, are realizing this as well. Free and open source software is the wave of the future. Kids shouldn't be learning anything else—certainly not closed, proprietary technology.

So maybe Microsoft is taking the first baby steps toward open sourcing their tools and technology so that developers of all ages can have access to them. We'd be glad to help.