Sun's Schwartz sees open sauce with everything

SUN SUPREMO Jonathan Schwartz has been telling the Times of India that open sauce is booming.

He said that adoption of open source technologies was accelerating rapidly thanks to economic pressures.

Schwartz said that Open Office is downloaded a million times each day now, while a year ago it was half that. Take-up of Glassfish, Sun's open source application server, has also doubled in the last year, and that of MySQL, the open source database, has increased 30 per cent, he said.

Open sauce heaven is in places with good bandwidth and large student populations. India has been doing well, for example.

Universities are apparently major seeding grounds for open source ideas and when these students go on to join the workforce they take their appreciation of free software with them.

Governments have been amongst the most aggressive backers and users of open source software, particularly in developing countries.

While people have been wary of the cost of open sauce, including service and support fees, many companies are finding that open source software is more stable and better supported. µ