Sun open source chief resigns

Simon Phipps departs following Oracle purchase

Sun's chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has left the company following its acquisition by Oracle. Phipps announced his departure on blog on Tuesday US time.

"Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean)," Phipps wrote. "I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer."

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle is poised to become what some analysts think is the industry's most powerful open source vendor. But it will chart a new path in open source without Phipps.

Phipps looks back fondly at successes at Sun, but admits some regrets for goals left unaccomplished. Phipps wrote that he and his colleagues "achieved some amazing things" such as changing Sun's attitude toward open source, kick-starting the "corporate blogging revolution" with Blogs.Sun.com, and releasing software such as Java under free licences.

"I didn't do any of that alone, plenty of it wasn't my idea, and without the groundwork of others before me it would have been impossible," Phipps wrote.

Phipps also listed several disappointments, chiefly that "despite the success of the open source software businesses, it still wasn't enough to rescue Sun in the end."

More specifically, Phipps said he's "sad that Apache did not get the TCK licence they requested." That was in reference to a long-running debate in which the Apache Software Foundation accused Sun of refusing to grant it an acceptable licence for an open source Java SE implementation called Harmony.

Phipps did not detail his reasons for leaving Oracle/Sun or say whether he was forced out. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz also left the company after the Oracle acquisition, announcing his resignation last month.

Phipps has not decided what to do next in his career, he wrote. Before joining Sun, he was the manager of IBM's Java technology centre.