In his opening keynote at the annual CommunityOne open source developer conference, Ian Murdock, vice president for Developer and Community Marketing at Sun Microsystems, will discuss the increasing role communities play in the software industry, how technologies and the companies and communities that create them are increasingly interconnected, and how the power of community can and should play a role in next generation platforms. Additional Sun executives keynoting at the event include Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, and Rich Green, executive vice president of Software.

CommunityOne, a Sun-sponsored event, is a gathering of communities that includes thousands of developers and members from the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, GlassFish, Grails, MySQL, NetBeans, ODF Alliance, OpenSUSE, OpenID, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Python, Ruby, Ubuntu and many others. Now in its second year, the annual CommunityOne gathering brings together more than 4,000 attendees, including several hundred students, from 80 countries to share in the power of communities.

During the event, Murdock will host a highly interactive keynote panel, "A Multitude of Models, How Communities Work," with community leaders: Jeremy Allison, Matt Asay, Mike Evans, Ted Leung, Mårten Mickos, Stormy Peters and Jim Zemlin and will discuss community models, how they differ and why those differences are good for all community participants.

During his keynote, Green will introduce the OpenSolaris operating system (OS). Created through community collaboration, OpenSolaris will allow users to fully customize their open source OS deployment, quickly and easily. OpenSolaris will deliver a leading-edge, easy-to-use and familiar development and deployment environment unrivaled by any OS, while providing world-class support and access to award-winning technologies like Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and Solaris ZFS. Download the new OpenSolaris OS for free at www.opensolaris.com.

As part of the CommunityOne program, the Sun team worked with NetSquared, a non-profit based in San Francisco, to help local non-profit companies harness the Web and help make their organizations more effective. For more information about their ongoing project visit: http://www.netsquared.org/mashup.

Marnie Webb, co-CEO TechSoup, stated, "Being part of CommunityOne has been awesome! NetSquared (http://www.netsquared.org/), a project of TechSoup (http://www.techsoup.org/index.cfm), is driving the adoption of technology and Web 2.0 tools by nonprofit organizations to accelerate their ability to create positive social change. The Meetup/Mashup was a huge step forward in making that possible."

For those unable to attend CommunityOne in person, Sun will Webcast the general sessions, as well as the technical sessions at: http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone.

For more information on Sun Microsystems contact Cate Hanley, Cate.Hanley@bitepr.com at Bite Communications.