Sun Startup Essentials Launch

Today in the morning I visited the Sun Startup Essentials Launch in Israel. The turnout was relatively low. I think there were not more than 100 ppl there, many of them from Sun and the other companies presenting their offerings. I was invited as one of the local Open Source people - I think in the hope that I'll distribute their message to many of my friends in the Open Source community.

I am not sure I understood what is the connection of this program to Open Source other than Sun is trying to get some advantage out of it but if they promote Open Source then I am for it.

I am also quite interested to see how I might use this offering of Sun to improve quality of Perl (and CPAN etc) and in general the Open Source projects. I hope we can find some way getting hardware from Sun or at least getting access to machines where we can setup smoke testing or we can even debug our applications.

I also met someone who is in a consulting company. As he asked me what is the Perl Training on my name tag I explained, I am providing, err Perl Training. So he went on asking why not Python saying something about the time of Perl is over and now Python being the real thing and everyone using Python. He says this is what all the companies use now and the fact the Yahoo has taken it under it the best choice.

Strange I though Yahoo was more like a PHP shop if you can say anything about them and Google was the main Python company. Yahoo, as most of the big companies are using a variety of languages.

Anyway, he then went on explaining that 10 years ago he had to debug some Perl code and it was very difficult and in the last year he used Python which is really good.

So I wonder if he is basing his opinion (and charging fee for that) on his experience 10 years ago?

I asked him but he did not seem to be interested to keep talking to me so I had some time to locate the food stand.

If you missed the event or the same event a day earlier in the UK, you can still see some of the talks here:

Juan Carlos Soto on the launch of the Sun Startup Essentials program in Europe