Open Source seen fully merging with mainstream in 5 yrs

Interview with Kim Polese

''In the last decade or so, open source has won acceptance from across businesses,'' Polese, now CEO of SpikeSource, on a business visit to Bangalore, said. “Owing to its cost effectiveness and flexibility to mould it to individual requirements, open source solutions has been adopted widely by start-up companies, large enterprises and governments across the world. I see open source thriving and becoming mainstream so much that we won’t be talking about it in the next five years,” she added.

SpikeSource has emerged as the software giant’s important certification partners in the last couple of years, having helped them automate enablement of open source solutions into the Windows platform.

After working for a short time with Intellicorp, Kim took over as Java product manager at Sun Microsystems and has been credited to have given Java its name. She remained at the helm of Java’s evolution for almost seven years. “It was mostly a well-kept secret inside Sun for much of the initial time,” Kim recalled, talking of the time she worked with some of the most prominent engineers at Sun. “We brought Java to the public realm in 1995, after initially failing to launch it with a Set Top Box.

The advent of the first ever internet browser, Mosaic, gave us the trigger to launch the Java-based browser that suited our vision of linking the world with a single network.”
She co-founded Marimba and lead it through its public offering before selling it to BMC.

DH News Service