Interview with Simon Phipps

Well, we didn't yet get to finalize our interview with Sun, but LinuxJournal.com has, and it's a very interesting and revealing read. Simon Phipps talks a bit about the history of Sun Microsystems and their way to where they are today, one of the friendliest companies to Free Software and one of the biggest contributors to it.

However, I've noticed some potentially dangerous vagueness in the way Simon described some of their past practices as "open source" when they really weren't that. Both Java and Solaris were before under licenses which were not accepted as neither "Open Source" nor "Free Software" so it doesn't seem fair to talk about these efforts as such. They may have been more open to collaboration than some others, but they weren't FOSS. They are FOSS today, but that's only since recently.

Comments are also worth a read.