Simon Phipps (pictured), Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, outlined a number of upcoming highlights for JavaOne 2007, to be held May 8-10 in San Francisco. Phipps, in an exclusive interview with Java Developer's Journal and Enterprise Open Source Magazine, was especially animated about the prospect of CommunityOne, to be held the day prior to the conference proper, on Monday, May 7.

"This is an open and free event, and will feature many of the outstanding voices iin the Open Source community," Phipps said. He said that developers who are interested in attending this pre-event should go to his blog and register, as he anticipates it will be a full house.

The full recorded interview will be streamed by SYS-CON.TV  prior to JavaOne. Here ar ethe highlights from this podcast from Simon Phipps' blog:

First, there's a new, no-charge pre-conference called CommunityOne. It includes OpenSolaris, NetBeans, Glassfish, even RedMonk (running their very first RedMonkOne UnConference). Although it's free of charge, we're expecting a large crowd so you must sign up if you want to get in - NetBeans Day already has over 800 registered delegates, and the rest of the tracks are filling fast.

The .Org Zone on the exhibit floor at JavaOne Tuesday to Thursday is open to bona fides .Org FOSS communities - I wrote about it earlier. I gather it is over 90% full so you'd better hurry

There's an Open Source Track at JavaOne itself, where I will be moderating a panel with Eben Moglen and Cliff Schmidt of Apache - great place to compare-and-contrast licensing philosophies.

There's a new unConference called JavaOne Camp taking place on site - JavaOne attendees must register (for free) to attend.

There's a place to park your boss while you attend JavaOne - the new Business Day on Tuesday. I'll be speaking at that about open source models.

Finally, my group (Sun Open Source Group) is running an unBOF at the Thirsty Bear on Wednesday evening, including the traditional Blogger's Beer Bash.