Sun is
continuing its acquisitions strategy, not of companies but prominent open
source programmers.
James
Gosling today announced during his keynote at Sun Tech Days in Sydney Australia
that Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki will be joining Sun to work on all of the company’s Python projects.
Leung is an
author, a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and a long-time Python
developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). Wierzbicki is the lead
implementer of the Jython project (Python on the Java VM). The two
join Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, JRuby creators Charles Nutter and Thomas
Enebo and Nick Kew, a leading developer on the ASF platform, who have recently
joined Sun to pursue open source projects.
The Python
language is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that is used for a
variety of applications, from desktop to Web applications. Sun is a platinum
sponsor in the upcoming PyCon 2008 conference in Chicago this month.
Sun’s strategy as of late has been to broaden its virtual
machine to support a number of dynamic languages, not just Java. CEO Jonathan
Schwartz told attendees of the SugarCRM Customer and Developer conference last
month that Sun wants to “take the J of the JVM and just make it a
VM.”