Liferay enjoyed a great JavaOne this year, our third corporate appearance at the ground zero of the Java development world.  The emphasis this year was on openness, community, and the individual, reflecting the transformation our industry and culture have gone through over the last decade. In IT, that's been reflected in a shift from proprietary solutions controlled by the few to a landscape where unknown upstarts out-maneuver established vendors. It was also a nod to the buzz-idea of the season, which is the empowerment of the individual (reflected in Time's Person of the Year being "You" and the never-ending stream of business models chasing ways to "monetize" on mass participation). 

Visitors to our booth came looking for core developers by name ("Is Jorge here?" "I'm looking for Neil Griffin, please"). A by-product of the phenomenon of open source community is that many of us have never met each other in person. Conferences, especially the developer-focused JavaOne, are a chance to make our connections more personal—and of course, to talk about new ideas and features for Liferay. 

Several of our visitors came from Sun Microsystems, with whom we made an announcement on Wednesday morning of the conference. Their portal team has known about our relationship for some time, but now that it's "official," folks from many other Sun departments and product groups wanted to see what the buzz was all about. Many were of course excited to discover Liferay's capabilities and consider new possibilities for how to leverage Liferay and the related Sun products in their own work.

The announcement was taken positively by customers and community members as well. It was important to us for people to understand that this initiative was an organic growth of our extant open source community and not simply a marketing-driven, top-down initiative without real value. Analysts and reporters we spoke to about the announcement were surprised how exclusively tech-driven the relationship was, but I believe that's what makes it innovative. We are enabling real open source collaboration among several communities, bringing several voices to the table, and working together to build solutions that enterprises and individuals can use.  

I also had several engaging conversations with various business counterparts at companies like IceSoft, Terracotta, Intalio, and SpringSource. The common denominator from my conversations seems to be that open source companies genuinely care about delivering value and service to their community members, whether they are developers, end-users, corporations, or not-for-profits. We are all at a crossroads between proprietary and open solutions, "old school" and "new school" business models, and of course, profit vs. service motivations.  The trick is to build sustainable businesses without betraying the community. 

Finally, I'm very excited about Liferay's new developer network, in beta today on this site. We want to bring people out of the woodwork and recognize the contributions our community makes everyday to Liferay Portal. We also expect to see increased participation from this, as people see the benefits of raising their profile in the Liferay community.