In my humble opnion, one of the best presentation at Supernova 2008 was clearly the keynote by Jonathan Schwarz of Sun Microsystem. The best take-away from this was to me – having an open source perspective – Jonathan Schwarz’ four key points to Sun’s open source business strategy:

1. Open source your code (this is ofcourse self-evident for any oss strategy)

2. Collect all the data that you possiby can about interactions with servers, web-site etc, even though you don’t know at the time of collection what to use the data for. You are going need for something in the future!

3. Be transparent, in particular about your data collection and processing. If you are trying to be sneaky about this, someone will discover and publisize it and your company will suffer.

4. Keep copyright to all your code. You want to make your code available to the world under an open source license, but you want to control the code. You are not putting the code in the public domain. If you control the code by having the copyrights you might use dual licensing.

To me these points really charecterize a modern, pragmagtic open source business. A lot of companies can learn af lot from listening to Jonathan Schwarz.

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