I should have blogged about this announcement of my new role when it occurred on June 4th, but I was so busy with JavaOne and a lot of customers, that I have not had the time for blogging.

 Since this is the first day of Sun's FY10 and I am on vacation here in Ocean City, Maryland waiting for the morning fog to burn off, I thought I should mention my new role Chief Technologist (CT) for Global Systems Engineering (GSE) in the Software Line  of Business (LOB).  That is a long title, but one that I am very, very excited about and thankful to have this new role at Sun.  I was the CT for North America and then the Americas (including Canada and South America). 

 Sun is still second to none in the ability to create strong software communities in the open source world.  We are continuing to tweak the monetization framework to adjust to this evolving economy.  Without question, open source already has won and it is just a matter of time before everyone realizes this.

Below is a snippet of the text from my announcement on June 4th, 2009.

Dave joined Sun in early 1987.  In 22+ years at Sun he has held a variety of positions working with a broad range of products and applications for a wide ranging set of customers in both commercial and government markets. Dave has been in the computer industry since 1978 and has held programming, management, sales and systems engineering leadership positions for a variety of companies, and has been working with Unix since 1981.  Most recently, Dave was the CT for North America's SW Practice holding this position for almost five years.

Dave led the creation of Software Genius University (SGU) with some of our top SEs in the Software Practice and across Sun that delivered 760 hours of content. Each week, Dave hosts a technology webinar, with Brian Leonard, for Sun's global
 employees and Sun's global partners.

Dave was the "father" of the Mid Atlantic Area Technology Center for Sun.  This multi-million dollar Center had over 300 customers through it in just over seven years and has posted world class industry leading benchmarks.  The Center won the 1996 World Wide System Engineering Creativity Award.

Dr. Harry Foxwell was kind enough to provide me with a copy of his GREAT book on OpenSolaris.  The book is extremely well written and a must buy for all those interested in the best operating systems in this universe.  A little history here -  I interviewed Harry prior to him coming to Sun in 1995.  Harry has been a fantastic SE and an even better friend.  Harry likes to exxagerate how hard the interview really was.  Now, I have to admit that I was going through my Patterson and Hennessy Computer Architecture phase, so I was treating prospective candidates as if they were postdocs at either UCB or Stanford :-) 

As Harry signed below, "This will help Solaris "go to 11"!  

Below is the cover of Harry and Christine's book. 

Apress's Pro OpenSolaris is the second English language book to be published specifically about Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris open source operating system.  The first was the comprehensive,1000-page, OpenSolaris Bible published by Wiley in March 2009.  That book purposely covered all aspects of OpenSolaris for those with only basic familiarity with Solaris and UNIX as well as for those with greater administration and developer experience; it reviewed desktop tools, networking, shell programming, and system administration along with the unique features of OpenSolaris.

Pro OpenSolaris, published in April 2009 and based on the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release, assumes the reader is already comfortable with the user and development environments of GNOME and Linux; it focuses primarily on the key OpenSolaris features that should be learned and exploited for Web development.  It includes an extensive chapter detailing a sample Webstack project based on the zones, ZFS, security, and SMF topics introduced in the preceding chapters.  The book also highlights relevant online references and resources for further learning.  Although all of the information about OpenSolaris is available on myriad Web sites, books such as Pro OpenSolaris give you a roadmap and recommended sequence of what to learn first.  It also strongly emphasizes that open source solutions can be effectively hosted on OpenSolaris as well as on Linux.

You can purchase Pro OpenSolaris here at Amazon or at Barnes and Noble.

I started 22 years ago today - May 4th, 1987 for Sun Microsystems.  Back then I was young, 27 years old, no kids.  In four weeks I am old, I turn 50.   Julie and I have three sons - John a Junior at VT, Michael a Senior at Broad Run who will be at VT next year with his brother and Tim an Freshman at Broad Run High School.   My oldest son John is Campus Ambassador for Sun and President of the ACM at VT - so I kept Sun in the family.

Chances are extremely, extremely low that I will celebrate a 23rd anniversary with Sun Microsystems as Sun will likely be just a memory a year from now - much like Burroughs, DEC, Apollo, Data General, Sperry Univac and countless other computer companies that either acquired, merged or simply went belly up.....

The photo above I took on our 25th Anniversary last year when we spent a month in Europe with a 12 day cruise in the middle.

Thanks to Mabimal for the great questions and comments on open source monetization.  Recently, on April 29, 2009 at 11:02 PM EDT, Mabimal asked the following:

I was asked on my blog regarding open source by Mabimal on April 17, 2009 at 05:49 AM EDT the following:

The image below is what is commonly called inside Sun, the Rainbow or Donut Blue Print for Open Source Monetization.  The key to this is that the light green is the community version/edition and the orange is the Enterprise Edition.   The Enterprise Edition is based on a revision of the Community Version, but also has the massive scaling, industry specific addons , 24x7 support, best practices, hot fixes and enterprise monitoring that large enterprises will want/need **IF** they do not have the in house expertise.  My personal opinion is if you think you will make all your money off professional services and indemnifcation, you better go back and do some more financial modeling.  Speaking of Professional Services, this is predicated on having a strong support and services organization.

I believe that we will see another layer to this model and that is cloud services.  You can not simply throw your applications into a cloud and think you now have a cloud.  That is like putting a 638hp Chevrolet Corvette LS9 ZR1  engine into a Vega and thinking you now have a sports car :-)   More on adding the cloud layer to the donut or rainbow later.

 Hope this helps Mabimal ....

With all the news today, I just wanted to share some memories of Sun over the past 22 years I have worked here at Sun.  Note, I am still here at Sun, just thought I would take a couple of minutes to write down some of my memories over the many years.

When I first spoke with Sun Microsystems, it was the summer of 1984 and Betsy MacLean (later Ferry) and Steve Ferry had recently went over to Sun Microsystems from Systems Development Corporation (SDC) a Division of Burroughs Corporation.  I met Betsy and Steve while we were all at SDC.  It is interesting to note that SDC based in Santa Monica, California, was arguably the world's first computer software company as noted by Wikipedia.  I was not smart enough to go over to Sun in 1984 :-)  

Sun was founded in 1982 with Sun standing for Stanford University Network (SUN).

In 1986, I was an SE for SDC and technical lead for a HUGE and extremely challenging opportunity for High Performance Workstations opportunity where Sun Microsystems was the digital workstation and Masscomp was the analog workstation of choice.   At the end of 1986 and long after the completion of the bid and benchmarks,  I started talking to Sun Microsystems about working there.   I started on May 4th, 1987.  

Betsy hired me and was a great manager and leader.  My mentor was Neil Groundwater who was clearly the smartest person in computers that I had ever met.  In the summer of 1987 we found out we won the HPW business that has since been worth at least $2 BILLION to Sun Microsystems over the years - yes that is B as in BILLION. Steve Ferry was THE Sales Rep on this opportunity and to this day is far and away the best Sales Rep I have ever seen/worked with and a great friend to this day.

 There are so many people to thank for the great, great memories that I have of Sun Microsystems.  I have to first thank Betsy for hiring me, Neil for being a great mentor and a great friend.  I have worked with and for lots of great individuals for 22 years at Sun.     I had the privilege of working for three great SE Directors - Joy Warfield,  Brad Kirley and Sue Walls who all showed great leadership and courage.  Most importantly, Joy, Brad and Sue firmly believed in the Sun mantra "work hard and play hard".   In the "play hard" vein, Dennis Govoni and I pulled countless pranks on each other and have teamed up with others on some very memorable April Fools Goofs as well.

During the past five years I have been the Chief Technologist for the Software Practice and it has been the most fun I have had at Sun.  I have had the great fortune for working for a true software leader in Dave Profozich.  Dave has been a great leader and friend.

By far, the most fun and rewarding experience I have ever had was working with Dave Patterson of Berkeley on MTConnect.

Finally, a huge special thanks to Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and John Gage.  While John was not officially one of Sun's four founders, he was always known as the "fifth Beatle" and employee #21  John coined the term "The Network Is The Computer".   Below is one of the classic photos that we always used for presentations to show the founders.

I remember Scott McNealy signing my Sun 10 Year Anniversary Yearbook in 1992 with the message:  

I remember being with Bill Joy, John Gage and Neil Groundwater having dinner in Georgetown and the wine list was given to me to select.  This is the classic pig staring at a Rolex watch type of scenario with Dave Edstrom looking at a wine list.  I looked at the list and said, "how about a pitcher of Busch beer?"   Neil Groundwater gave me one of those looks that could kill.  Bill Joy was very cool about it.  Bill said, "Dave, a cold beer sounds good and John, why don't you select a bottle of wine as well."

I could go on and on with stories, but this is enough for today.

It is a sad day when a company that had so much energy and creativity as Sun Microsystems dies.  Sun is probably best known for Java, Solaris and SPARC but there is so much more at Sun Microsystems.   If you worked for Sun during its peak, it was quite the company to work for.  As my oldest son John, who works for Sun as a Campus Ambassador, told me this morning, "Sun had quite a ride."  Yes, it was a great ride!

Who knows how this will all shake it out, but at this time I am reminded of the old phrase, "You can not adjust the wind, you can only adjust your sails...."

There are many individuals who are confused about open source and monetization.

 The first two rules on open source and monetization come from Marten Mickos in 2007 who was CEO from MySQL at the time:

“Success in open source requires you to serve:

                  1. Those who spend time to save money
                  2. Those who spend money to save time."

 The important concept that Marten Mickos is driving home is that just like every other topic on planet earth, open source monetization is not black and white, but a gray scale continuum that we are still discovering some of the finer points.

                1)  There is no guarantee of monetary success just because you have lots of users.

                2) If you ask someone about their monetization strategy and they come back to the concept of lots of users, then they have not a clue what they are talking about.    There is no direct cause and affect between lots of users and guaranteed monetization.   Yes, there is tremendous potential, but just like voltage - which is called potential, what you really want amperage.  If you think this is not true, go google Xerox PARC's history and let me know how well the ROI went there.

                3) There are analogies between open source monetization and every day products that you used today.   Do you buy a warranty for a product that has a reputation for never breaking down?   Probably not, unless your duty cycle is much more strenuous than the typical user.  If you are running a business and you are using free software that never needed to be updated and never broke down would you worry about service?  Probably not.    Are there very many examples of software that you never update?  Unless you are talking about a black box aka embedded application, the answer is not too many.   There is an important analogy between home devices/appliances and enterprise software.  That analogy is duty cycle.

 My uncle, Merle Edstrom owns his own Welding business called Cannon Welding in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.    One of the metrics that Merle cares about is the maximum duty cycle for a welder.  The welding duty cycle is defined as the percentage of time in a 10 minute period that it can be operated continuously before overheating.  As a professional businessman, Merle's duty cycle needs are very different than your typical home owner.  Quick advertisement for my uncle.  If you live anywhere near the mid part of Minnesota, Cannon Welding is the best and you should call Merle for all your welding needs!

In software, duty cycle is defined many different ways, but a common link to hardware duty cycle would be the reliability of the software expressed in the classic SLA or Service Level Agreement.  If my business is running a mission critical open source application (as most are these days), then having a single throat to choke, 24x7x365 support, hot patches, professional services, value added services for massive scaling or vertical industry specifics are just some of the things that I would be willing to pay for.

At Sun we are clearly defining our Community Version and Enterprise Edition software.

More on my favorite (ok, one of my favorite topics :-) later....

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it
        is the quality which guarantees all others."

Winston Churchill

Today is the two year  anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.  As a parent of a VT student (and one more likely to be there next year), it is still hard to comprehend the magnitude of this tragedy.  I put in the Winston Churchill quote because courage is what I think of when I think of the Virginia Tech.

My prayers go out to the family, friends and relatives of the victims....

Today is tax day for Americans. A day everyone just loves :-)   When I think of April 15th, I think of security and how it is more important than ever.  There is an article today that I just saw on Yahoo!

Hackers grabbed more than 285M records in 2008

• By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer - Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:05AM EDT

Jordan Robertson states:   "Hackers made off with at least 285 million electronic records in 2008, more than in the four previous years combined, according to a new study that shows identity thieves are getting better at exploiting careless mistakes that leave companies vulnerable to attack."

The rest of the arrticle can be read here. 

I believe the  days of single factor  authentication are over and the days of securing at the pipe level alone are over as well.  As much as I am not a proponent of big government, I do think there are many valuable services that government has and will do for society.  Does the Internet happen if not for DARPA funding?  I don't think so.  When I think of the right way to do identity management, I think of the DoD's Common Access Card (CAC)  program.

Sun Microsystems was a big part of the CAC program and, we at Sun have taken a similar approach with our Java Card.

Now for a controversial suggestion :-)  Have the US government follow DoD's lead and issue CAC to every single US citizen above the age of 6.  I have kevlar underwear on for this one :-)

Getting away from policy and back to technology, two extremely important standards going forward for security will be SAML and XACML.   More on those in coming days....

Jim Fiori recently presented at Virginia Tech's Association for Computing Machinery Meeting.  My oldest son, John, blogged about Jim's GREAT 2 1/2 presentation.  Jim's slides are also here.

If I was told, "Dave, you get to pick one person on planet earth to solve the most difficult software performance problem mankind has ever seen, and if this person fails, the earth as we know it burns up in an attosecond."

I know exactly who I would pick:  Here's a hint, it would not be Bill Joy, Dave Patterson, Steve Bourne, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Neil Groundwater, Grace Hopper or Bjarne Stroustrup.

No disprespect to those computer legends above, but I would select Jim Fiori.  Jim Fiori is a great example of  Malcom Gladwell's Outliers primary premise, which is you need to get to 10,000 hours of actual hands on experience, along with selecting the right parents, being born at the right time and finally, being in the right place at the right time - Jim Fiori meets all of these criteria.

Jim Fiori is a Principal Field Technologist at Sun Microsystems and is THE GOD IN SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE TUNING AND PROBLEM SOLVING. 

Sometimes, very rarely for me, when you are googling around, you find something that is both a surprise and makes you feel great at the same time.    I was discussing just how bogus MTBF is with my oldest son John, when I told him he needs to read Dave Trindade's GREAT book on Applied Reliability.   Many years ago, Sun had some challenges with e-cache.  e-cache is the abbreviation for external cache or cache that is not directly on the microprocessor.   I was the lead in terms of delivering the detailed message to customers.   Dr. Dave Trindade is a god in statistics and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.  It was Dave Trindade who did the statistical analysis and told us all at Sun the right way to think about this challenge that really made ALL OF THE DIFFERENCE with conveying the message to customers. 

I had the good fortune of traveling with Curt Harpold down to Virginia Tech on January 28th, 2009 to listen to Curt present, "How To Program 1,000s of Processors".   Curt wowed the ACM members on the challenges of programming lots of processors as well a the many tremendous features of Sun Grid Engine 6.2.

For complete details of this along with a video as well as Curt's complete presentation, please go to John Edstrom's blog entry here.

 The Wall Street Journal reported that early reports are the stimulus package may have the following amounts for Healthcare:

• $39 billion in subsidies to health insurance for the unemployed; providing coverage through Medicaid
• $90 billion to shore up state Medicaid programs
• $20 billion for health-information technology systems
• $4 billion for preventative care

This will be a great opportunity for companies like Sun Microsystems that has a very strong software infrastructure stack and known for our secure and scalable software.  The canonical quote is that 40% of Healthcare costs are administrative. The other statistic that is often quoted is that nearly 98,00 Americans die each year due to medical mistakes.   President Obama stated on Monday the 9th that healthcare premiums have doubled for the average family in the past eight years.

There is an article at Sun where Bill Vass brings out the following:

"So, here is the background: If the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is the information highway for health data exchange, CONNECT is the universal on-ramp for federal agencies. CONNECT is a software solution that lets federal agencies securely link their existing systems to the NHIN. More than 20 organizations collaborated to build CONNECT through the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), and as a result, agencies are heading down the road toward interoperability.

Using Sun's entire Open Source middleware stack as its foundation, including our SOA and IdM technology, the FHA built the CONNECT gateway software from open-source code. Talk about an Open Source poster child! The solution was jointly developed by federal agencies yet it will be deployed individually at the agency level. The decision to build the solution in open source provided the usual benefits (I know you have heard these from me before):

· Cost reductions for each agency and taxpayer savings

· IT consistency and compatibility across multiple agencies

· Decreased deployment times

· Security"

One of Wayne Gretzky's famous quotes is:

"A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be."

Healthcare is where the IT puck will be going....

The Washington Post had a very interesting article Tuesday February 3rd titled, "Data Breaches Are More Costly Than Ever".  The author Brian Krebs quotes a survey by Ponemon Institute that reviewed 43 organizations that spent approximately $202 on each consumer record that was compromised.

The article also states:  "Eighty-four percent of the companies surveyed had at least one data breach or loss prior to 2008, said Larry Ponemon, the institute's founder. The cost of a breach in 2007 was $6.3 million, and roughly $4.7 million in 2006".

 The figures above do not reflect the loss of confidence that consumers and other companies will have when they see these types of CNN moments.   This is where the importance of having a open and secure operating system and infrastructure becomes mandatory - as does having all of your data encrypted on disk.  How often to we read about notebooks stolen that are loaded with confidential or classified data?   

This is just one of the reasons why Solaris with Trusted Extensions and ZFS will just continue to gain market share

My Aunt Evie passed away on Friday January 16th, 2009 in her home in Zumbrota, Minnesota.

Evelyn Gloria Irene Husbyn was born March 10, 1929, in Minneola Township, Goodhue County.    She grew up on the family farm, attended country school, and graduated from Zumbrota High School in 1947.   On Jan. 17, 1948, she married Stanley "Tat" Thompson in Zumbrota.

Below is Evie and me at my sister's Ph.D. graduation at George Mason University in 2006.  Evie is the lady in the white hair second from the left.

They owned their own businesses and were extremely successful.  I remember working at their Skelly Gas Station in Zumbrota, Minnesota with my cousin Richard Franklin while our Grandpa (Melvin Thompson) would oversee our duties. My Grandpa would give discounts to all customers when they filled up their cars or trucks, but it was a total to mystery to me on his percentage discount logic.    When I asked Tat and Evie on what math logic that Grandpa was using they just laughed.  They told me, "Dave, Pa does not have any logic, he simply makes it up as he goes."   Neither Tat nor Evie would tell my Grandpa to stop, because they knew that it made Grandpa feel good to give the people of Zumbrota a discount on their gas.

Tat and Evie epitomized the smart, caring and cool couple.  

Tat and Evie always had the coolest cars.  There was a time in 1970 when Tat owned a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T that had  7.2 litre engine at 375hp, 0-60 in 6 seconds, 0-100 in 13.3 seconds and top speed of 150mph.  That year and model car was voted the best muscle car of all time.   Evie had a 1970 Ford Torino Cobra Jet that had the 429 cubic inch engine with 370hp, 0-60 in 6 seconds and was Motor Trend's Car of the Year in 1970.   Tat and Evie's love of cars, trucks and motorcycles (Tat owned Harley-Davidson's long before it was fashionable to do so) really created a love of cars, trucks and motorcycles in everyone's lives they touched.   One of my life goals was to have a car faster than anything that Tat or Evie owned.  Finally, at age 42, I bought a Corvette that as faster than anything Tat or Evie owned.  But, Tat and Evie had more cool in their little fingers than I have in my whole body :-)  You can not buy cool.

 My family moved around lot growing up.   When Tat and Evie would come visit us, the excitement level was palpable.  Tat always had a big wad of cash in his pocket.   No one on planet earth knew more jokes or stories than Tat Thompson.  What always amazed me about Evie is that no matter how many times she heard Tat tell a story, Evie would always laugh out loud like it was the first time.  One time when Tat and Evie came to visit I was in the process of buying a 1972 240Z and need to pay cash to the owner so I had $2,100 on me.   After Tat and Evie were there for awhile, I said to Tat, "Tat, I don't have any clue on how much money I have in my wallet right now, but I will bet you $100 that I have more than you do."   Tat said, "well, I don't want to bet you, but let's find out."   Tat had about $700 or so.  After I got to about $1,000 Evie just started laughing.  It was like that MasterCard commercial - pricelesss.

 Evie was extremely smart in dealing with people and had a level of common sense that was unmatched.  Evie's mother, Ida, was the same way.   I remember when I was 18, I was giving Ida a hard time because she had (literally) $3,000 in a freezer in Tat and Evie's cellar.   When I told her that she was not making any interest by doing that, she simply responded with two sentences that put me in my place and I am reminded of that conversation today.  

Ida asked me, "Dave, let me ask you one question.  If you went to the bank to get your money and that bank was closed down and you lost all of your money, how long will you remember that day?" With our economy in the toilet and getting worse, I think of Ida's advice often....

Evie will be greatly missed among all who knew and loved her....  

There is a GREAT Student Competition for MTConnect with the winner going to EMO Milano 2009!

Develop a novel application for MTConnect^SM , and you may win  a trip to the EMO Fair (Europe’s premier manufacturing show) in Milan, Italy next October 2009! 

Below are the Contest Details from the MTConnect site.  After you read the contest details you can click through to the MTConnect student competition site with lots and lots of details that can get you started!

Contest Details

Use MTConnect to develop and report on a novel application for intercommunication between manufacturing systems, machine tools, devices, sensors, software and have a chance to win a grand prize of a trip for your and your team to attend the EMO Fair in Milan, Italy, October, 2009 and display your work to the international manufacturing community. 

1. Go to MTConnect.org, and become a member of MTConnect^SM community (free) by following the login procedure. 

2. Go to the student competition area of the website for competition and entry procedures. Sign in and download information/resources including:

· MTConnectSM Draft Standard (0.9.11) (Final), 

· MTConnectSM Simple Client Application, 

· XML Schema, 

· MTConnectSM White Paper and 

· watch the Student Competition Video at YouTube (follow link) to get familiar with MTConnect. 

Sample project applications are also available on the MTConnectSM Student Competition Website.

3. Develop a cool MTConnect^SM application for manufacturing using MTConnect^SM.

4. Write a report documenting the details of your application (motivation, approach/procedure, results, future potential, etc.) of your application and send it in. See Judging Criteria below.

5. Do it before May 15, 2009. (See details below about concept paper submission by March 13th, 2009 – approved concepts will be able to submit a final competition entry).

6. Winners will be announced on June 1, 2009.

7. Winning entry team members will be invited to EMO Milano 2009 in Milan, Italy October 2009 to display their project at the MTConnect^SM Booth.

CLICK on this link to learn more about this GREAT Student Competition for MTConnect with the winner going to EMO Milano 2009!

Manufacturing Business Technology discusses Sun and MTConnect. Below are the first few paragraphs:

Sun Microsystems joins the MTConnect Technical Advisory Group (MTAG) to further define the open communication protocol standard it helped create for the manufacturing technology industry a year ago.

MTConnect is an open manufacturing technology standard that uses Internet communications technologies as its basis to allow manufacturing technology vendors and customers to safely and easily communicate.

"Sun Microsystems has a long history of working with the industry and academia to create and promote open technology standards that drive genuine innovation,” says Dave Edstrom, Chief Technologist of the Americas Software Practice for Sun Microsystems. “Open source and open standards are the keys to unlocking manufacturing innovation and efficiency around the world, particularly in growing emerging markets."

 The rest of the article can be found here.

Last night I was flying in back to Dulles, from Cincinatti with a stopover in Charlotte.  I was coming back from a great MTConnect Technical Advisors Meeting where we voted through the MTConnect 1.0 Standard.  It was a GREAT meeting and a historic day.  More about MTConnect later this weekend.

Because of fog, we looped around around Charlotte until the pilot said, we are running out of fuel and need to land in Greenville-Spartansburg.  We get to Greenville-Spartansburg and sit on the runway for 45 minutes.

The pilot comes on literally says:

        "Folks, when we are grounded for weather related factors, we are not
        required to provide housing or transportation. If I were you, I would
        get a hotel room.  Good luck."

Ah, airline service at its very best...

Luckly for me, I ran into four fantastic people.  Vance, who offered to give me a ride to Charlotte.  The hero for all of us was Dawn of SAP.  Dawn is the highest level of traveler at US-Airways - Chairman Preferred.  Thank god for Dawn, she called the Chairman Preferred 800# and got all of us set for flying out to Charlotte the next day.  Michael of Oracle got the rental car.  All Todd, the exotic car shipper, and I had to do was ride to Charlotte with Michael and Dawn.    On the way there, Dawn used her very high level with Marriot to get us a distressed rate of $99 instead of the $169 normal rate.

We all joked that this was like the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles :-)  I did joke with Todd that he reminded me of that guy in the movie Something About Mary and the Rest Stop scene.  Luckily for me, Todd laughed.

We got to the hotel in time to get in our rooms by 2:00am and I was up at 5:30 heading back to Charlotte to fly out.  Luckily for me, everything went well today getting back for Dennis Govon's Farewell Party.

My faith in humanity was lifted last from South Carolina heading to North Carolina with the kindness from Oracle and SAP's employees.

In today's incredibly tough economy and with the likelihood that 2009 will be much worse, there has never been a better time to look at Sun software.   There is a well written article in eWeek titled Making Money on Technology in a Recession.

The article states: "More optimistically, CompTIA recently released a study of 772 small to medium -size businesses that found that 51 percent said they expect to increase IT spending while 49 percent said they plan to decrease IT spending.

The long and the short of this is that nobody knows for sure what exactly is going on with IT budgets in 2009, other than some companies are trying to cut back some spending across the board, while others are trying to cut back IT spending in some areas so they can spend more money in other areas."

Open source is listed in the number one slot as the main item to consider in IT's recession planning.  I would argue that open source should always be #1 on the IT list and not because of cost, because it's smart.   Most CxO's that I meet with have dual stack approach for both a legacy/proprietary strategy and an open source strategy. 

The open source strategy is something that most CxOs are evolving over time with the Sun's open source software being a significant part of that strategy. Sun has donated more source code than the next five contributors combined.

Below is a link to Sun's Free and Open Source Licensing White Paper

Licensing plays an important role in shaping an open source community. Read about Sun's view on Free and Open Source licensing.

This whitepaper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

I am growing tired of answering the question, "Dave, why don't you have an iPhone yet?"

First, do I think the iPhone is amazing technology?  You bet.  Do I think Steve Jobs is an absolute genius?  Without question.  Is Apple a great company?  Yes, they are an amazing company.  But, let me list what Apple should do for the iPhone if they want me as a customer (yes, I realize that Apple does not care if I am a customer :-)

1. No cut-n-paste.   Are you kidding me?  When friends tell me, "Dave, you just don't understand the Apple lifestyle."   Yes, I guess that is true.....   When I hear on podcasts that Apple is researching the best methods for implementing cut-n-paste,  I just have to laugh.   If this is true, let me give you a hint, go ask the folks at Palm, they have it figured out.
2. No removable storage. It is very handy to have the ability to remove a SAN disk.
   
3. Not all apps can take advantage of the horizontal mode.  This is ridiculous.
4. The battery is not removable.  Yes, the most recent updates help, but Apple is not there yet. I want the ability to carry a second battery with me.
   
5. It should be a reliable phone.  If I had a dollar for every time a friend said to me, "hey, I am using my iPhone so we might get dropped and I will have to call you back", I would have enough for at least a dinner out :-)
   
6. The iPhone is simply too proprietary for me and I believe that it stifles the amount of innovation we would otherwise see with the iPhone.  Yes, Apple does a great job with ease of use and overall experience, but I prefer freedom.
7. The idea that Apple will "brick" your phone is just repulsive to me.
8. I want real keys to type on, not a picture of a key.  Yes, I know this dates me :-)
9. The App Store has so many rules on what type of app it allows that, IMHO, it stifles true creativity and true competition.   Checkout this article at the New York Times titled:  Apple's Capricious Rules for iPhone Apps
   
10. No Java for the iPhone.  Hopefully this might change someday....
    
11. No voice activated calling.
12. You can not record video.
13. I do love the features of the G1, but have not gotten one yet.  The Palm Pre sounds VERY promising as well.
    
14. NO MULTI-TASKING   THIS WILL SERIOUSLY LIMIT THE i-Phone
15. I will keep my old Treo 650 that just works great as a phone and basic PDA with a limited browser, until there is something that is at least as good as the G1.

If Apple addressed these, would I buy an iPhone?  In a femto-second.

This is a CSPAN captured video titled "The Way Forward: Privacy, Domestic Intelligence, and Information Sharing" on CSPAN is absolutely worth watching. As was stated at CSPAN: "The Majority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security hosted this series of roundtable discussions on the future of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security in Cannon House Office Building."

The balance between privacy and security is an ongoing balancing act.  A good point brought out is that we need not only a CTO for the United States, (John Doerr suggested Bill Joy) but we need a Chief Security Czar as well.

Sun Microsystems has the absolute best Identity Management solution that is being open sourced with Sun's Open SSO Enterprise being a great recent example.  As I have often said, look at the Intelligence Agencies for the right way to think about security, look at Telcos for the right way to think about availability and look at manufacturing and NASA for realtime and look at Wall Street regarding putting all three together.

Look for Sun Microsystems to continue to show leadership in all of these very important markets.

 Thanks to Neil Groundwater, long time friend, mentor and Unix legend, who sent me this fascinating article called A gift or hard graft? written by Malcom Gladwell.

The premise of the article is:

"This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours."

Gladwell discusses the great amount of time that  Bill Joy invested to hone his programming skills:

"According to Joy, he spent a phenomenal amount of time at the computer centre. "It was open 24 hours. I would stay there all night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in those years I was spending more time in the computer centre than on my classes. All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class at all, of not even realising we were enrolled.""

Gladwell tells a great story of Bill Joy at Berkeley:

"In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written - "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' "."

The legend of Bill Gates and the amount of time is well documented.  What is not well documented is just how hard and long The Beatles worked.  I was always under the impression that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were just pure musical geniuses and it just easy.  Gladwell corrects this perception:

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

The article ends with a very interesting point about the importance of being born in the years 1954 or 1955 with great summary of Sun's founders:

"By the way, let's not forget Bill Joy. Had he been just a little bit older and had to face the drudgery of programming with computer cards, he says he would have studied science. Bill Joy the computer legend would have been Bill Joy the biologist. In fact, he was born on November 8 1954. And his three fellow founders of Sun Microsystems - one of the oldest and most important of Silicon Valley's software companies? Scott McNealy: born November 13 1954. Vinod Khosla: born January 28 1955. Andy Bechtolsheim: born June 1955. "

Now I know where I went wrong in life, my parents waited four years too long to have me :-) 

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson writes a very interesting article this morning dispelling the age old myth about the origins of the phrase"May you live in interesting times"

I nearly forgot, Happy Thanksgiving everyone....

One of my three sons wrote a paper on Voting Machines that briefly discusses David Chaum's logical approach to this challenge.

Below are three paragraphs from my son's paper.  I am posting this not because I am just trying to fill up my blog :-) , but the three paragraphs below do clearly and concisely state a logical approach to voting machines.

"A new more reliable voting machine has been developed by David Chaum, in which you physically type in the name of the  person that you are voting for.   When your choice is confirmed 2 receipts that look like a random scatter of squares print out, although you only take one. The other receipt drops down into the machine, and it is stored, in case your vote needs to be recounted. Your receipt is specific to the card you didn't choose, and the candidate you voted for is saved from being lost. I felt this was an ingenious idea to keep people's votes from being left out and made it fairly easy to recount them. You can even check online by typing in the serial code on the receipt into a web site to find out if the person you wanted to vote for got your vote. I like the idea of a receipt that is merely an encrypted card; it doesn't tell people who you voted for, but it is simply used to verify that the vote that is cast belongs to that specific card.

These voting machines can affect our system of democracy in both expected and unexpected ways. The obvious way is the technical errors; despite what we would like to believe, machines are not perfect.  They do break down, and they can make mistakes. While it does reduce the human error of physically losing a paper vote, it creates a whole new set of possible errors, such as casting a vote twice, not casting it at all, or even casting it for the wrong candidate. This could cause the wrong person to win an election that maybe should have gone to the other candidate. This would certainly affect our democratic election. Such problems on national scale would not go unnoticed and the proper actions would be taken to correct the problem, but the few who do experience these problems probably never know it. The lack of a paper trail means we are putting our vote into something that we cannot physically see or touch, and this can frighten most people.

This leads to another unseen impact the machines have on democracy: people's willingness to vote.  In the states where only machines are allowed, a person with very little confidence in the credibility of these machines, may feel so inclined as to not even show up to vote on Election Day. This does not apply to everyone, but I'm sure it is very possible. This is why I feel the best solution is to get the most reliable machines to cast our votes in election, but always provide paper to the people who want it."

Sometimes the most clear, concise and compelling statements come out of the military.   My current favorite from The Pentagon is:

A vision without resources is called a hallucination.

Scott McNealy has said on many occasions, that a big part of Sun Microsystems overall historical success is the tremendous talent and passion of Sun's pre-sales technical contributors.

Today, Wednesday November 19th, 2008, we say farewell and best of luck to one of the best there ever was --  Dr. Dennis Govoni.

I have been here at Sun a long time (21 1/2 years), and I can say that without question there is *no one* who has had more positive and long lasting impact on the technical community in the DC area for Sun Microsystems than Dr.  Dennis Govoni.

For those of you who have not had the privilege of working with Dennis, let me give you a little background.

Dennis Govoni has been working with computer technology since 1967.  He became Associate Professor of biology at Virginia Wesleyan College (VWC) in 1973, and introduced timesharing computing into both the business and academic areas of the college.  He also received a National Science Foundation grant to develop a generative CAI program to help students understand Mendelian genetics.

After leaving VWC in 1983 to work full-time in the computer industry, he joined Prime Computer, Inc. as a Networking and OS specialist. Responsibilities were in both the government and commercial worlds. Upon leaving Prime, he joined Tandem Computers, Inc. in the Telco District as a senior analyst supporting the new fault-tolerant Integrity UNIX line.

In 1992, he joined the Sun Microsystem as a network architect and specialist. While serving in this capacity, he developed the Networking Survival Kit, a Web site devoted to providing information and teaching materials for system engineers around the world as related to networking and Java technologies. This effort resulted in his being named network ambassador of the year for 1995.

In January 1999, Dennis Govoni worked with Astronaut Sally Ride on EarthKAM: NASA, the Internet, and Education Working Together.  

In 2002, Dennis was one of the first three Technical Directors selected from the *entire* global pre-sales technical community.  Dennis was one of the creators and leaders in the Southern Area Technology Facility (now the Solution Center), an author for Sun Journal, SE-Times, The Technocrat, mentors for many SEs, creator of the Sun New Hire program that the rest of Sun embraced, the SATC, the Worldwide Technical Readiness Council with industry thought leaders such as  Hal Stern and Dan Berg, Technology At Sun Group, Java Evangelist, Java Realtime expert, security expert, networking expert, and countless other committees and councils, the list just goes on and on....

I have worked worked with Dennis on literally countless technical and business opportunities both inside Sun and outside with Sun's partners and customers. If the problem was extremely complex, Dennis was always the first one consulted.  Dennis would bend over backwards to help out anyone who asked.

Both Dennis and I had the privilege of jointly working for three great SE Directors - Joy Warfield,  Brad Kirley and Sue Walls who all showed great leadership and courage.  Most importantly, Joy, Brad and Sue firmly believed in the Sun mantra "work hard and play hard".   In the "play hard" vein, Dennis and I have pulled countless pranks on each other and have teamed up with others on some very memorable April Fools Goofs as well.  There is not enough space on all the sundc servers to talk about all of those.   We were very fortunate that during that time we had the best HR person of all time in John Gardner.  John clearly understood the importance of office chemistry and its affect on employee productivity and morale.

My all time favorite April Fools Day was Govassic Park on April 1st, 1997 when John Meyer, Neil Pierson and I turned Dennis's office into a version of Jurassic Park called "Govassic Park". 

My personal favorite memory of Govassic Park was when Barb Govoni was upset when she saw we had dinosaurs eating her only two grandchildren :-)

My all time favorite customer visit was when Bill Joy's office called and asked Dennis, Conrad Geiger and me to visit a company in Chicago.  This company claimed to have *invented* a storage device using sub-atomic particles and aspects of quantum mechanics.  We all made the trip out there on a very cold winter day.  Let's just say, that this "company" clearly did *not* invent anything.  Makes for great memories though... Dennis, Conrad and I laughed all the way back to the airport  :-)

Dennis, we all want to thank you for your tremendous contributions over the past 16+ years at Sun and wish you nothing but the best. 

Dennis, you can *NOT* be replaced....

You can reach Dennis at dngovoni@verizon.net or you can leave a comment here at my blog.

Rich Green, Executive Sun VP of Software, did a fantastic job leading Sun Software over these past two and half years (Rich came back to Sun on May 1st, 2006) and I am really bummed to see Rich leave.    Rich oversaw the most important and significant changes to Sun's software portfolio that Sun has ever gone through since we transitioned from SunOS to Solaris.

Rich has had a long and impressive history with Sun.  He was VP of the Java Group, where J2ME, J2SE and J2EE were defined and developed.  Rich was personally responsible for the success of Sun's Java strategy and platforms.  Obviously, Rich did a great job.

Prior to leading the Java organization, Rich was VP of the Solaris Products Group and prior to that he managed the design and development of distributed object systems, network communication products, desktop integration technologies, software development tools and database systems.

Rich was a real thought leader in Sun's open source software strategy.  The acquisition of MySQL can also be credited largely to Rich as well.   

Rich liked to say, "Volume Drives Value."  This is a simple but powerful concept: the more developers there are on the network, the more compelling devices and services they create, the broader the market opportunity for Sun's network innovations - hardware, software and services.

On Monday November 13th, 2006 - Sun open sourced Java:

Rich said at the time, "This undoubtedly is the largest single open-source contribution in the history of IT." 

Mike Dillon, Sun General Counsel was quoted at the time:

The transition was tedious and legalistic, said Sun General Counsel Mike Dillon. "Java Standard Edition contains about 6 million lines of code," Dillon said. "Our legal team [of 190 lawyers] had to go over it, line by line, and look for all copyright marks and third-party involvements.  Where Sun didn't have the correct licenses, we had to contact the owners, one by one and determine the rights." In some cases, Sun had to settle with copyright owners.  Dillon said the company considered some of the 200-plus open-source licenses but settled on the GPL because "it has the largest development community at this time driving innovation, and that is what Sun is striving for."

 Something that Rich and I shared in common was that we both love the movie Annie Hall.  Annie Hall has more great lines than any other  movie that I can think of.  Woody Allen played the character Alvy Singer in Annie Hall.

Alvy Singer: "I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school."

Thanks for everything Rich.  Best of luck to you in all your endeavours.

This was the best CEC by far.  The training was World Class quality.  It
never ceases to amaze me that when we ask Sun's technical community to put in
the nights and weekends to create top notch hands on training - they always
deliver.  That we are able to capture all of this is even better.

While we have seen a great deal of change at Sun Microsystems in the past few
years, the one constant is the deep passion Sun's technical community always
demonstrate when it comes to helping each other and Sun's Partners get smart
about our technologies.

I had the privilege of giving a one hour presentation on Open Source Monetization that I will share parts of later this week on my blog.

Most importantly, we all owe a HUGE Thanks to Kirk Brown, Sun Global Software Chief Technologist, for his great leadership of CEC 2008.

 Tom Toles of the Washington Post that captured just how important today is with this op ed cartoon.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

 Without question, this is the most historic day in my lifetime and if we ever needed a transformational and inclusive leader it is now.   Barack Obama has been given a very tough hand, but I believe that he has all the tools to be a truly great President of the United States of America.

I was at the Sun Office in Irvine, CA a few weeks ago and they had a 1982 Sun-1 in the lobby.  Below are two photos I took from my cellphone.

As Wikpedia states:  Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA. The Sun-1 systems ran SunOS 0.9, a port of UniSoft's UniPlus V7 port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, with no window system. Early Sun-1 workstations and servers used the original Sun logo, a series of red "S"s laid out in a square, rather than the more familiar purple diamond shape used later.
The first Sun-1 workstation was sold to Solo Systems in May of 1982.^[1] The Sun-1/100 was used in the original Lucasfilm EditDroid non-linear editing system. 

 As I have first personally heard Scott McNealy say, "the first serial number was 15 so customers did not think they were getting one of the first systems."

Something cool to check out is the SUN Workstation Architecture, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Forest Baskett, Vaughan Pratt, Stanford University Computer systems Laboratory Technical Report No. 229, March 1982

Another interesting tidbit of Sun history that I learned at the 25th anniversary of Sun Microsystems at The Computer History Musuem was that Vaughan Pratt was the person who designed the famous Sun logo.

As Wikipedia points out, the Sun logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word "sun"; it is an ambigram