Props to Coté for a coining a great term. His post on TechEd ’07 CommunityDay is interesting on a couple of levels, this caught my attention:

For me, the most interesting aspect of the sessions was the hunger the audience generally had to get the code. For example, Thomas Jung demo’d a way to build Flex applications in the SAP editor [I’ve forgotten the name], doing away with the need to use FlexBuilder. Audience members kept asking him when SAP would release and where they could get it, and does it come in JSP flavor? The answer was that Thomas had worked on this after hours, that it was his code, and soon to up on Google Code as an open source offering.

I am hoping we see more of this, the unchaining of smart people hidden behind firewalls is nothing but goodness not just for the tech industry but for people everywhere. Open source means has ripple effects, the ripples that travel the farthest are the ones that begin with people doing things they are passionate about because it seems like a good thing to do rather than someone telling them to do it.

BTW, Coté wonders about SAP and Adobe, suggesting that their closeness is something more than just a good working partnership. These two companies have been close for years, and arguably SAP was the most important partner that Adobe had when they wanted to get into enterprise IT shops, much like SAP did more for Microsoft than any other company to legitmize SQL Server as a "real database". I wouldn’t read too much into the Apollo development work, we heard Vishal Sikka say without hesitation that they will work with Silverlight as well.

Tags: SAP, Teched ’07, open source