This week, the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is taking place--March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference will include much discussion on the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been  running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighed in on the open cloud, and Novell VP Justin Steinman wrote about open source and mass customization. Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft, also discussed the consumerization of information, and Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath weighed in. In this final installment in the series, OStatic is very pleased to offer up a guest post from Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, on what's next for open source. Here it is, below the fold. 

Back in August, in partnership with Sun Microsystems, OStatic introduced its first free hosting promotion. The promotion offered 100 free online hosted accounts for a year to developers looking to build web applications powered by the open source Glassfish Application Server and the open source MySQL database. The response was overwhelming, and the 3-month campaign was sold out 6 weeks early. We have a few more promotions in the works--and here's more on them.

Last week, as part of a dual-promotion between OStatic and Sun Microsystems, OStatic introduced a program through which Java developers can get a year of free hosting for applications powered by the open source GlassFish Application Server and MySQL--both from Sun.  GlassFish is an app server project for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, and is based on source code donated by Sun and Oracle. Its servlet container employs a derivative of Apache Tomcat. We checked in with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun and a co-founder of GlassFish, about GlassFish and open source issues.