Yesterday Cameron Loudon and I met with a couple of Sun people at their Brisbane office; Stuart Sim and David Bunker. At a previous meeting I demoed ICE to David, and we saw some opportunities for potential collaboration. David was kind enough to organize yesterday's meeting when Stuart was in town.
(Stuart is Chief Architect, Business Solutions, Global Education & Research and David is Business Development Manager, Education & Research for Sun in Australia)
ICE is open source software, released under the GPL. ICE leverages the power of OpenOffice.org and therefore StarOffice, both of which are controlled by Sun. It is our understanding that Sun are trying to promote the use of StarOffice in universities, in order to capture the hearts, minds and keyboard fingers of a new generation of office software users, leading them away from Microsoft's domination of desktop computing.
The presentation is embedded in the document below, and you can view it as a Slideous slide presentation as well.
Some key points from our discussion:
Sun have lots of resources to help with outreach on projects like ICE – if and when the time comes.
Sun do want to drive adoption of Star & OpenOffice.org in higher-ed, but Stuart says that a lot of their contacts have been with IT departments not faculty.
There are some opportunities for ICE hosting / services that might be of interest to a company like Sun with links into higher education. Note that we haven't done any deals. Cameron and I were just showing ICE and chatting...
I said quite bluntly that OpenOffice.org Writer will not take off in academia without usable bibliography software. I'll put Stuart in contact with David Wilson and Bruce D'Arcus of the OpenOffice.org bibliography project.
Background on ICE
Sun