Jonathan Scwhartz, Sun's COO and one of my favorite bloggers, is talking up Sun's new branding as “The Participation Age.” He believes it will eclipse the information age (when the main internet activity was accessing a database).

As you've probably seen, we've been talking up the Participation Age.
The Participation Age leaves behind the network as a tool for the
uninformed to access great databases in the sky (known as the
Information Age), and drives toward a network in which individuals can participate.
They can drive the dialog, drive economic opportunity, for themselves
and their communities. They can educate, not simply be educated.
Individuals can participate - leveraging a growing world of free
services and technologies, from blogs to Java, wikis to a world of wonderful new services.

Sun has committed itself to open source software as one means of eradicating the digital divide and accessing global markets:

So why on earth would we give our OS away for free?

Because it'll ensure those without the economic wherewithal to pay
for it will still consider using it. Companies that suffered from
piracy a decade ago now know the lesson well - piracy is a good thing
so long as the pirates are folks who could never afford your products.
So stop calling them pirates, call them users. Free software has no pirates. As I've said forever, there's value in volume, even if you're not paid for it.

Do I worry about enterprises or corporate customers taking
OpenSolaris and not acquiring a subscription to someone's (hopefully
our) service contract? No, not in the least. Do you really think a
hospital, or an air traffic control authority or a Minister from an
African nation would run their institution on unsupported software? No.
No way.

Are we guaranteed to get that business? Nope. But we are
guaranteed the opportunity will be greater than if we kept Solaris
locked up. And I'd rather get 20% of a business that's planetary in
scope, than 100% of a business with 17 customers. Like I said, there's
value in volume. (And I haven't even touched upon the impact of open
sourcing on innovation.)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 18th, 2005 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Learning 2.0 Services. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.