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Thursday June 15, 2006

OpenSolaris - 1 year of opening Sun development

It seems just yesterday that Solaris went IPO. Yet, now it is celebrating its first anniversary. A good time to reflect on the effect of OpenSolaris on the internal Solaris developer community. What have really changes since Jun 14 2005?

The source

I think the most important direct effect is that users and customers now ask direct questions about how something works and developers can explain them exactly what is going on. On more than one occasion I was exchanging e-mails with customers explaining the intricacies of the STREAMS framework implementation and pointing to specific snippets of code and getting questions about this code. This has a downside as well: the easily availability of code may create lots of implicit dependencies on the implementation details. Hopefully developers will continue sticking to the published APIs.

Documentation

During the first year OpenSolaris site become a huge repository of technical documentation for both existing and future projects. One day we discovered that someone decided that our server hosting all the internal documentation for the NUMA project is a test machine and completely wiped out all the content. We decided to just move all the information to the OpenSolaris site - together with prototype code and binaries.

Development

Another major change for the internal developers is that they are not quite "internal" any more! We now routinely publish proposals, code reviews, prototypes PSARC cases and other development by-products and are anxiously expecting useful feedback. It seems like some areas (e.g getting the favorite shell as Solaris default) are getting much more attention than boring issues of scheduling and memory optimization, so I hope that the next year will catch up. All of us would like to see deeper penetration of community involvement in the guts of Solaris internals.

Psychology

I have seen several cases when some projects didn't want to go open initially and tried to follow the traditional path. The peer pressure inevitably pushed them out - for the better. I myself usually initiated internal code reviews before opening a public discussion - all of us want to avoid embarassement :-). I think, by now we are doing much more open development. It is becoming a norm by now and getting part of the process. And part of the fun!

[ T: OpenSolaris anniversary 2006 ]