Phipps, Johnson and Van Couvering

Sun Open Source Leaders

Apache's Blogging and Database Projects
34 minutes, 15.7mb, recorded 2006-10-11
Phipps, Van Couvering and Johnson

The Apache Tomcat Web server, Roller blogging server and Derby database initiatives all share one thing: substantial contributions by Sun Microsystems. Apache is also incubating Harmony, an open source implementation of Java. In this episode, a trio of Sun open source leaders explains where and how Sun contributes to Apache projects, and why it is content for now to let Harmony proceed without Sun's direct contribution. In an extended segment with Simon Phipps, he defends the existing Java language governance model, explains why there's always room for multiple implementations of standards, and shares his concerns about the OSI's proposed Open Standards Requirement and Microsoft's Open Specification Promise.



Simon Phipps is the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems. At various times he has programmed mainframes, Windows and on the Web. He was previously involved in OSI standards in the 80s, in the earliest commercial collaborative conferencing software in the early 90s, in introducing Java and XML to IBM and most recently with Sun's launching Sun's blogging site, blogs.sun.com. He lives in the U.K., is based at Sun's Menlo Park campus in California and can be contacted via http://www.webmink.net.

David Van Couvering is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has spent his engineering career crossing the bridge between databases and the middle tier world of application servers, Java and distributed systems. He was the original architect for the Sybase J2EE application server and for the first release of the clustered Sun Java Application Server Enterprise Edition. Currently Van Couvering is involved with Java DB, a Sun-produced distribution of the Apache Derby open source database and is a committer on Apache Derby.

David Johnson is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has worked in a variety of software companies including Rogue Wave, HAHT Software and SAS Institute. In 2002, unable to satisfy his urge to create cool software at work, Johnson worked nights and weekends to create the open source, Java-based Roller blog server. Johnson now works on Roller full-time and is based in North Carolina. Johnson is the author of Manning Publications' book RSS and Atom In Action.

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