Student Ambassadors for Open Source

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Interview

Student Ambassadors for Open Source

6/29/2007

By Mary Grush

CT: Why did Sun Microsystems establish a Campus Ambassador Program that centers around open source?

Bahal: In order for computer science or IT people to be successful, a lot today is based around open source. At Sun we've taken billions of dollars of intellectual property and open sourced it. If you look at three big things, Java, Solaris (which is the operating system that competes with Linux), and SPARC (which is the chip)--we've open sourced all of that. So our message is, for [these students] to be successful at work, they've got to understand how to utilize the open source technologies, how to work in the communities associated with that, and how to give back to the communities. [See photo, left to right: Dinesh Bahal with campus ambassadors from China (Rita Zhang), Russia (Filipp Shubin), USA (Kira Morrow), and Brazil (Rafael Vanoni) in Sun's Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park, CA. Photo by Mary Grush.]

What's the nature of the collaboration this program fosters among these international students?

Part of the reason we care so much about open source is not just getting people involved, but more importantly that it provides an instant feedback mechanism to the product groups. Let me give you an example. One of the most active Open Solaris user groups is in Brazil. They have a really active community, and that community may be porting [code] from, let's say Linux to Solaris. It starts appearing on the Open Solaris Web site, and I think there's almost a ratio of 1:10 of the number of people who are contributing code to the number of people who are telling what they want to see in the code. So, now we have a conversation [directly] between the engineers and the users, which in the past would go from engineer, to product marketing, to customer, and back: The layers between the engineer and the user are disappearing. What used to be a five- or six-layer mechanism is down to a virtually zero-layer mechanism.

The minute you get that type of conversation going, you get products that are more relevant to the customer, more relevant to the end-user. And because you have this transparency, the quality of the technology improves--because it's not just one engineer and a review cycle, it's people from all over the world looking at this. Also that transparency [speeds up] the cycle time of what people are trying to do.

What technologies impact this kind of communication, globally?

Sun was one of the first few companies to open up blogging, and we have one of the most actively read blogs in the form of our CEO, Jonathan Schwartz's blog. I don't have the exact number--but I think an additional 3,000 people at Sun are now blogging. So it's a significant number of the employees that are blogging. And their blogging is most importantly about product directions.