Scott McNealy's talk at Tallahassee

Sun Micro Systems' Scott McNealy
Keynote Speaker
2008 Florida Government Technology Conference
Tallahassee Civic Center
Tuesday, September 23, 2008

I attended the 2008 Florida Government Technology Conference at Civic Center in town today (Tuesday, September 23, 2008 9-10:15 AM) where Scott McNealy, Chairman of Sun Micro Systems gave the keynote address with a title "Sharing Wins - How Open Source Technology Can Drive Growth and Progress for Florida".

He told the audience first what he will NOT address and gave examples like, storage, cloud computing, thin clients, etc. Then he went on to speak about how Sun has been a pioneer in Open Source ever since they started their work (Bill Joy) at BSD in early eighties and their continued theri work in opening and implementing TCP/IP. He stressed that how they are continuing their support for open source with projects like MySQL, Java, OpenSolaris, and JavaFxScript.

He stressed that even though many in the public sectors like Government and States are concerned about safety and security of an "OpenSource" he that assured people it is no worse than a proprietary system with secret built into it. He said if there is secret built into a system, people will try to break it and the outcome will far more harder to solve than an open system which has tested thoroughly.

He also mentioned that Sun is doing okay financially. He then briefly talked about open source educational project called www.curriki.org.