Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer’s new Gig

August 27, 2010

Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps.  Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer.  Here is what Simon says:

Some of the topics Simon tackles:

  • ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
  • Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
  • ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
  • Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Brian Aker discusses Drizzle, DB for the Cloud

August 18, 2009

On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.”  For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing .  I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.

Some of the topics that Brian tackles:

  • Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
  • Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
  • One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
  • Is Drizzle production ready?
  • What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
  • Why the name “Drizzle”?

Update:  Here’s the Register article based on this entry.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Sun’s New VP of Cloud Computing Strategy: Ian Murdock

January 25, 2009

Last week at Cloud Connect I was able to grab a few minutes with my old boss from Sun, Ian Murdock.  Ian, the founder of the Debian Linux distribution, came to Sun to lead the Open Solaris charge and after that tackled Developer relations.  Turns out that with the latest Sun re-org Ian has now landed in the Cloud Computing group as the VP of Strategy.

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the topics Ian Tackles:

  • How cloud computing today reminds him of the Open Source world back in 1993 when he first got involved with Linux and Free Software.
  • What might be the equivalent of the Linux distro in the cloud space.
  • The importance of standards and how Sun might play there.

Extra-credit reading:

Update — Articles based on this post:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George