Simon Phipps - thoughts from the frontline

After a decade at Sun Microsystems, with the last five stewarding Sun's open source projects, Simon is now serving both as a Director of the Open Source Initiative and as Chief Strategy Officer of open source startup ForgeRock. In all three roles, he has lived on the front line of open source in business, being the community to the company, the company to the community and trying throughout to crystalise a vision for the business of software freedom.

In this session, Simon will explore the current state of free and open source software, considering the nature of enterprise and ISV engagement, the nature of "the open source community" and how both are evolving in the age of cloud computing and connected devices. In particular, he will consider:

  • The roots of the changes of which open source is an expression
  • How to tell when software freedom is being promoted and protected
  • The changing balance of power between supplier and customer
  • The imperative of opne source software in government

The discussion will inevitabley pick up threads from and lead to new postings to Simon's blog, Wild Webmink.

Session time: Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 3:50pm - 4:30pm

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About the Speaker

Simon Phipps
Director, Open Source Initiative
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Photograph of Simon Phipps

A well-known and respected leader in the Free software community, computer industry veteran Simon Phipps has been involved at a strategic level in some of the world's leading technology companies. He has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. He was a founding Director of the Open Mobile Alliance.

Today he is Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock, an independent software vendor devoted to true open source development of identity, integration and interaction software.

He takes an active interest in several Free and Open Source software organisations, serving as a Director of the Open Source Initiative and on the advisory boards of Open Source for America, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and OpenSPARC. A widely read thought-leader, he publishes regularly both on his own blog and in many other places such as IDG's ComputerWorldUK.

In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun's employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, coordinating Sun's extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun's broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses.

He has been an outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) and other truly open standards for businesses and governments. Most recently he has been an advisor to local and national government agencies across Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America as they have devised and implemented strategies around Free and Open Source software.

He holds a degree in electronic engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.com.


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