Floss with Simon Phipps

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

Wow. So many take-aways from the interview with this gentleman who is in charge of open source and open standards at Sun.

“How did it happen that we got proprietary software in the first place? It was an unintended consequence. IBM had to start witholding source code in order to comply with the court’s consent decree.” (Anti-trust suit brought in 1969, verdict in 1983.)

“When you create a system, you inevitably create the game that plays it.”

“How do you monetize in the open source world? You charge at the point where the user finds value, rather than at the promise of value, which is the old proprietary model.” (For this particular quote, 28 minutes into the 70 minutes long interview.)

But mostly Simon, Leo and Randall talk on the issues of transparency, privacy, secrecy and the inevitalble coming of communities around Open Source.

I will edit this post, or follow up with more posts on this tremendously important topic, as soon as I’ve found time to dig deeper into Sinom’s writings and doings.

/peter

Peter Nõu @dkmj