Joe Hartley

Microsoft sees the light. Sort of.

Wednesday Feb 20, 2008

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.

[0] Comments

Post a comment

Like this post?

Posted at 04:05PM Feb 20, 2008 by Joe Hartley in Academic Developers
Tags: bluej developers education greenfoot java microsoft opensolaris opensource opensparc students technology

Don't call him a cowboy 'til you've seen him ride.

Thursday Oct 04, 2007

“What do you do for a living?” It's a typical American question that was posed to me in an atypical setting and by an audience that for me, answers the question “Why do you care so much about today's students, since they don't buy your products?”

I volunteer as an Assistant Scoutmaster for my son's Boy Scout troop and go to summer camp for a week immediately following the Fourth of July. The camp food is awful, so one night I convinced my 12-year-old to do the horseback-ride-sleep-under-the-stars experience. He didn't know that my real motivation was gastronomic: the ride included a real steak barbecue rather than Sysco processed food.

The camp employees who prepped the horses, led us on our ride and cooked the food are known as Wranglers. My stereotype of “wranglers” is that they're not the sharpest tools in the shed; otherwise they'd be doing something else. Also, at Boy Scout camp you never really know the age of the staff, as they span from high school to post-college. Between the dirt and natural variation in maturity I had no idea how old our wranglers were.

When we sat down to eat, we made small talk, and the lead wrangler eventually asked me the “What do you do for a living” question. When I evasively answered that I was in “the computer business,” it set off an interesting conversation. He admitted that he didn't know anything about computers but that one of the other wranglers did and was actually writing a video game. All of a sudden my son became very interested because he is very much into video games and has been “writing” the story for a RPG. (I'm still not quite sure what an RPG is, but I learned it stands for “role-playing game.”) The game-writing wrangler wouldn't disclose any details of his game—or about his staff of 18 people—because we hadn't signed non-disclosure agreements. (Where are the lawyers when you need them?)

At this point, the third wrangler, who had remained silent so far, asked where I worked. When I told him that I worked at Sun, the conversation took another twist. He began to tell me things I didn't even know about my company and its technology as it relates to Internet gaming. He then educated me about the pros and cons of Java vs. Microsoft's Silverlight vs. Macromedia something or other. I was amazed how much he knew about all three–and he wasn't even the future video game designer mogul!

When dinner was over, I just had to ask how old these wranglers were. The future media game mogul was 17. The future industry analyst was 15. My effort to avoid camp food became a real-life example of why we at Sun care about today's students even though they don't directly buy our products. Today's student is tomorrow's developer, customer and decision-maker. That much became clear to me that night under the stars.

[0] Comments