CommunityOne comments so far

After JavaOne last year, I told myself I'd attend NetBeans day in 2007. A month or so ago I registered for JavaOne and signed up for NetBeans day (not a very smooth process, I actually had to call someone to register for NB days because I'd already registered for J1) anyway, just after that Sun started to promote CommunityOne Day. So here I am at the first CommunityOne day, the day before JavaOne starts. The reason I wanted to come to NetBeans day (now CommunityOne day) was because it is so small. James Gosling just walked by me and he wasn't mobbed :-) I attended a presentation earlier today where Jonathan Schwartz was speaking and he was standing right behind me before the session started. Where else could you talk to Jonathan Schwartz with only 100+ people in the room? The message today has been pretty clear, Sun is going to open source all of its SW and innovation is the key. Almost every talk I went to today emphasized innovation. The argument goes like this, if Sun isn't trying to control everything, then their engineers are free to think about and work on innovation, it's what will set Sun apart from the others. Jonathan described the market as a really big pie and that there is plenty of room for many players. He also described how Sun will make money with this strategy, pull-through business by selling support, services and hardware. I think for me personally, I'm really excited about what Sun is doing. By making everything open source and freely available, means I can use the SW at home and on my own personal projects and in turn I can use it at work. I can see CommunityOne day being really big in a year or three so if you get a chance, I'd suggest trying to attend next year, before it's as big as JavaOne itself. For me, being able to talk to Jonathan or stop James in the hall is reason enough to come to CommunityOne. The content is somewhat different from J1. Instead of only being about Java (you could argue J1 is also going this way) you get exposure to everything Sun is doing in the open source space.