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Interview
Student Ambassadors for Open Source
6/29/2007
What types of openness impact the environment in which these students will work?
When you look at the open movement, it's at three levels. First, there's an open standards issue--for example, if I'm a public entity, why do I need someone to go buy something to access documents? Then, there's an open source issue--not everything will be open sourced, there will still be some room out there for proprietary software. But, companies that don't open source a significant part of their intellectual property are probably going to face challenges because the world is demanding that level of transparency. The third thing--and I think this is something that is really going to change education--is open content. So a teacher may say, "Look, I really want chapter one from the McGraw Hill book, and chapter two from another book, and chapter three from yet another book... and I want to be able to mix the best of all of this." And I think also that open content is going to be not only the ability to mix and match, but also that teachers all around the world will be creating and [sharing content in ways that will make it less expensive]--I think the developing world is going to start that trend initially, and it's really going to change all of the publishing industry. So, I think open standards, open source, and open content are going to be the three things around this whole openness that are going to drive probably the next few years, and companies that don't get onto that bandwagon and figure out how to make money around it are going to have challenges.
What do you see for the future of Sun's Campus Ambassador Program?
We want to try to expand the program in terms of its global reach, not just in geographical distribution, but from an institutional perspective as well. We have targeted universities where we want to have ambassadors, where we think it's really important for Sun to have a presence, and where we think that the students would get a significant benefit from having someone talk about open source. So, (a) growth, (b) distribution, and (c) a question we are looking at internally: How do we make materials more available to students? How do we create more content that makes open source more acceptable to someone teaching traditional classes? For example, if someone is teaching operating system design, how can they use materials in the public domain to teach those same concepts, and ideally do that with open source software? So at Sun, we want to make investments in open content.
Dinesh Bahal is Regional Director, International Global Government, Education, and Life Sciences at Sun Microsystems.
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