OStatic

Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz took the stage at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday, and OStatic staff was on hand. Sun, of course, has aggressively embraced open source software in its post-Scott McNealy period, as evidenced by its $1 billion acquisition of MySQL.

Schwartz discussed ongoing open source efforts at Sun, current work being done with Linus Torvalds, MySQL, and even the future of blogging at the conference.

Get your OSS education, people. While documentation, including tutorials, is often a weakness with open source applications--even very established ones--the good news is that there are some outstanding free tutorials on the web.

Sometimes these are delivered by the community behind particular projects, and sometimes they are from enthusiasts and other third parties. In this post, I'll round up good, free learning resources--including videos and demos--for top-notch OSS apps, including GIMP, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, SugarCRM, web development languages and more. A little time spent working on your skills at these sites will pay excellent long-term dividends.

A recent interview with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green (published yesterday in eWeek) makes for fascinating reading, especially in conjunction with the dustup over Sun's announcement that some MySQL enhancements will not be open-sourced.

Understanding how Sun views open source goes a long way toward explaining what's going on, and telegraphing its future strategy.

For many years, MySQL has been the best-known open-source relational database. Sun bought it and the company earlier this year, leading many to wonder what the business strategy would be. This week, the CEO of MySQL revealed part of that strategy -- the introduction of proprietary add-ons that will only be distributed to commercial customers.

Reaction in the open-source world has been quite negative. What does this shift mean for MySQL?