Would you to talk to some of the biggest names in open source?

No, not me! You know how to talk to me and I’m not exactly a big—or even middle-sized—open-source developer or executive anyway.

I mean people like SugarCRM’s CIO, Lila Tretikov; SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson: the father of Spring and an authority on Java and J2EE development; Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol, active in the mobile open source world; Brian Gentile, president and CEO of JasperSoft; he helped Bob Zurek, CTO at EnterpriseDB and leader of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Open Source Cluster; and Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL and now the head of Sun’s database group. In short, people who actually make open-source Work.

If you’d like to pick their brains, not to mention those of other open source professionals, get yourself over to the CIO Executives Online forum before the end of the week.

CIO is taking an old concept that dates back to the days when CompuServe and its dial-in networks was more important to some users than the Internet. The idea then, as now, is to get some top people together and get them to agree to talk to users on an online forum.

Everyone does that? Do they really? Some do, but many top people may talk to you with a blog, but they’re not going to talk with you. And, you’re certainly not likely to find Zurek of EnterpriseDB talking databases with Mickos of MySQL on either of their separate sites.

This idea worked really well on CompuServe, and I think it should work even better on the Internet. Head on over, ask a question, make a comment, you may be pleasantly surprised to see who answers it.