|
By Michael Eggebrecht
Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has stepped down from the company following the completion of its much-delayed acquisition by Oracle Corp.
The open source advocate spent five years in the position and more than nine years at Sun, joining as a director and chief technology evangelist in 2005. In a Monday blog post announcing his last day with the company, Phipps credited his team with changing “Sun’s attitude towards open source so that early, bitter critics have become people willing to defend -- or even join -- the company.”
Phipps added that during his tenure, Sun “got some of the most important software in the computer industry released under free licenses that guarantee software freedom for people who rely on them, regardless of who owns the copyrights. Unix, Java, key elements of Linux, the SPARC chip and much more have been liberated.”
Phipps joins former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz among Sun executives who have left in the wake of the $7.4 billion Oracle deal, which was completed Jan. 27 after drawn out scrutiny from European regulators. Schwartz, who made news by celebrating his last day on Twitter, left the company on Feb. 3.
On Twitter, Schwartz pointed to the financial crisis holding back enterprise investment as the reason for Sun’s demise. In his farewell, Phipps said, “I’m sad that, despite the success of the open source software businesses, it still wasn’t enough to rescue Sun in the end. But overall, I am amazed and humbled to see what the open source team at Sun has achieved.”
Before joining Sun, Phipps spent more than 10 years at IBM, serving as chief Java and XML evangelist before his departure. He also logged more than seven years as a software engineer at Unisys.
Like former CEO Schwartz, Phipps is an active blogger, posting regularly on his Wild Webmink site. In his March 8 blog, he cited Sun’s blogging emphasis as an important change while he was with the company. Sun “kick-started the corporate blogging revolution at Blogs.Sun.com, so that at any time you could have checked there have been around 1,200 Sun employees sharing their enthusiasms with maximum trust and minimum oversight. In the process we created policies that have enabled many other companies to start the same journey and gave employees ownership of their work.”
Phipps said that he has not determined his next career move, “but I intend to keep blogging, so I doubt anything I do will be much of a secret.”
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
