Sun Offers Reward Program to Boost Open Source Effort

e5rebel writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has announced they they will be creating a reward program in order to compensate open source programmers for their work in a hope to boost open source efforts. The program will involve communities like OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org according to Simon Phipps, Sun's open source officer. "Phipps' post comes some months after Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, voiced skepticism over the open-source status quo, where developers who contribute to various efforts go uncompensated while corporations are enriched. 'It really is a worrisome social artifact,' Green said at the time. 'I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do.'"

Comments

Re:I don't get it.

[EvilRyry]

It's an investment in their future. It will hopefully attract new developers, improve their software and get some new ideas in the mix.

Re:I don't get it.

[DragonWriter]

How does this increase Sun's revenues?

It improves the quality and attractiveness of software for which they sell professional support, services, etc.

Re:But Sun is already doing that...

[davidsyes]

Maybe they are trying to help resurrect or spur on:

http://www.gregspotts.com/main/2005/05/seacode_inc_aim.html

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/062705widernet.html

But, also, see (also from 2005):

Outsourcing Losing Luster:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/supercomm.html