Today, May 4th 2008 was my 21st anniversary working for Sun Microsystems. I am in San Fancisco preparing for CommunityOne and JavaOne. 2007 on May 4th, it was hard for me to believe that twenty years had gone by so quickly.
CommunityOne will become more important than JavaOne by 2015 in my opinion. More important in the sense of the overall scope and reach. JavaOne will always be an important event, but the depth and breadth of CommunityOne should just continue to grow and mature. The open source model will continue to grow and evolve with new twists and turns that we can not even predict today. Last year at CommunityOne, Rich Green made the statement to Jonathan Scwhartz, that "today we have Robin Hood in reverse." Rich went on to explain that, "today, we have the rich taking from the poor." He was referring to large companies taking code from the small developer with little or no direct payback.
The truth, with open source today, is that most large companies are funding open source. This is no secret to anyone who is the business. The challenge going forward will be around creating new and interesting revenue opportunities so the small developer or small partner can make a living off being a developer in the pure open source world.
CommunityOne starts tomorrow and if it is anything like last year's inaugural event, it should be a great day. I was amazed at the attendance and excitement last year at CommunityOne. JavaOne starts and when you have Neil Young as part of your event, how can you go wrong? :-)
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