HYDERABAD, INDIA--Delegates at last week's 7th instalment of Sun Tech Days sent out a clear message to the Indian IT community--developers have a much larger role to play in the world of free open source software (FOSS).
Hosted by Sun Microsystems, the Sun Tech Days developer conference in India has grown over manifolds over the last eight years, say company executives. Over 9,000 developers attended last week's Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad, which was beamed simultaneously to Chennai and Bangalore, compared to some 170 who participated in 2000.
Themed "Open Opportunities", this year's event featured track sessions on various Sun technologies such as JavaFX, JRuby, Java Platform Enterprise Edition, GlassFish, NetBeans, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Java Platform Standard Edition, OpenJDK and OpenSolaris.
"The world is being transformed by FOSS," Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, said during his keynote address, and added that open source is working out economically for Sun.
"Contrary to popular belief that open source means free and should translate into a drop in revenues, our revenues have increased by 13 percent year-on-year since we have gone predominantly open source," Green said.
Speaking to ZDNetAsia in an exclusive interview, he said the economic slowdown in the United States will favor open source companies. "During an economic slowdown, not everything slows down [and] IT projects will continue to be undertaken. But IT budgets will be reduced," he said, noting that companies will then turn to lower cost software options such as open source.
Green added that this offers tremendous opportunities for open source companies such as Sun. And this, in turn, would translate into a plethora of opportunities for developers in India, he said.
Sun boasts of some 652,610 developers in India, which also houses its largest developer community worldwide.
According to Rich, the IT vendor's revenue growth come from three areas, namely, subscriptions, global technology support and through Sun's knowledge base.
The company recently completed its acquisition of MySQL, an open source database currently deployed or being deployed in 66 percent of enterprises worldwide, he said, citing figures from a Gartner stydy.
Asked if he foresees the end of proprietary software in the near future, Green's answer was--no. "I think there will always be space for proprietary software that defines new markets. But once a company establishes its position, open source is going to come in and commoditization will become inevitable," he said.
On low-cost technologies and Sun's role in bringing such platforms to India, Green said he believes millions more will discover the Internet via mobile devices, rather than a desktop or a laptop computer.
"I am not sure if 'one-laptop-per-child' is the way the world is going to go," he added. "We have moved a lot of technology en masse from the desktop to the mobile device [and] are working on several open source technologies for the mobile phones."
Swati Prasad is a freelance IT writer based in India.
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