It was a good Saint Patrick's celebration: del.icio.us corned beef and cabbage, ice cold beer and a LOUD Dropkick Murphys concert. My first exposure to the Dropkick Murphys was this past baseball season when they performed at Fenway Park before Game 7 of the ALCS, and then again on a flatbed truck in the Red Sox rolling rally, with Jonathan Papelbon strumming along on his broomstick guitar.

And community is what it's all about these days. Communities of all types and kinds, each with a purpose, but all about sharing their common interests. Take OpenSolaris for instance. According to wikipedia "OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems."

Given the security focus in Solaris, it's no wonder the U.S. National Security Agency announced this past week that they are joining the OpenSolaris community to collaborate on new security mechanisms for operating system.

The cool thing about communities is members can chose the level to which they want to participate. The luck of the Irish was with me on Saturday - before I left for the concert, my teenage daughter warned me that moshing is big in the Dropkick Murphy community. So I chose to enjoy the celtic punk tunes from the venue's balcony - and in case you haven't seen moshing, there's a great YouTube video on it that totally had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Slainte!

If you're wondering why I just reposted this entry (St Patty's Day really was last week and I haven't been at the bar this whole time ), I fumble-fingered my blog and managed to unpublish this entry. Sorry about that!

The difference between "open" and "free" jumped right out at me last time I visited our Colorado office. The Colorado NW Parkway, which cuts a dreary 20 minutes off the drive to and from DIA, is open for me to use anytime. But the $6 tolls certainly don't make it free of cost. Yet while one is about liberty and the other economics, there is a relationship between the two...

The biggest open in my life lately is open source, an interesting development methodology for building solutions to challenging problems. The openness of source code is governed by a license that dictates terms with which a developer must use the code - for example, must all modifications automatically be made available to the community as in the GPL (used for Java) or can a developer hold some back as in the CDDL (used for Solaris)? Check out the plate I saw on a truck parked at the movie theater last weekend - based upon other bumper stickers I could tell the owner was a Linux fan - but if the truck was actually covered by the GPL, the rights to any truck modifications would actually go back to the truck manufacturer. Certainly this is a simplistic view on licenses, but you get the picture.

And while open source doesn't equate to free product cost to customers, there is an interesting relationship. Some customers might find it cost effective (again, depending upon licensing) to build their own infrastructure with open source. ISVs might chose to contribute extensions to an open source community to enable said ISV to offer a layered product at additional cost. Economics dictate how each uses the source code and economics will dictate how the use changes over time.

I recently heard the IT team from a large bank lamenting the high cost of software licenses - while they're thrilled processing costs continue to drop, software that is licensed per CPU or per core is killing their budgets. While open source won't directly help with their problems (the software application in question is not available via an open source community), there is work being done in open source that will eventually help. Open source lowers the bar for new players to come in and offer competing solutions - new players that can bring different economics to the game, eventually unseating software incumbants with high costs.

So yeah, I appreciate that the CO NW Parkway is a choice for me when I have barely enough time to catch my plane. And I'll deal with the $6 (Humm, I could expense it... Or I could just blow past the tolls while talking on my cellphone, like one of my coworkers who shall remain nameless - or is that a license violation?).

Let's set the background: First, we actually did grow up with respect to our storage portfolio (certainly a lot had to do w/ Sun's acquisition of STK). Check out the storage products we announced at SNW: our Low Cost Array, the library partitioning (ha – the only library on the market that can be shared between mainframes and open systems), our incredible file browser that lets you see across tiers of storage. New conversations are always easier when people believe you understand the old conversations. Second, the stage continues to change with exploding data growth (exabytes, exabytes, exabytes) and extensive retention periods (decades, decades, decades). When it comes to data, it's just not the same world it was last year, or the year before, or the year before that... And last but certainly not least, general purpose technology has caught up with the performance and reliability demands of storage - there's little need to build the world's storage from scratch anymore. Out with the custom ASICs and boards, out with the real-time embedded kernels. In with x64 servers, volume CPUs, Ethernet, and the general purpose operating system. So if you can build storage from general purpose hardware and software (check out the Thumper), what's next?

Open source, of course. Once you move from the proprietary to the general purpose, you can take advantage of all that world has to offer. Which is why on April 10th we announced an open source community for storage – because we're making the entire storage I/O stack within Solaris available via the opensolaris.org storage community. So customers and partners working to solve the world's toughest data management problems now have access to the source code and the developers of the world's best operating system.

Now that we've hatched our storage open source community, interest from storage analysts, press, customers, and partners is overwhelming. The ugly duckling has truly become the swan.

Now I spend my time talking to execs, customers, analysts, employees about how our cool technical inventions here help to make the world a better place - a fun position to be in when you actually have cool technical inventions to discuss, like Solaris, like Thumper, like ZFS. So I've been feeling pretty pleased with myself...

Then last week at a leadership conference our very own CEO Jonathan Schwartz said “The Geeks are in Power”. When you look at life in a cube these days (metaphorically speaking again, because who actually works in a cube?), who is more connected than the developer? Write some code and share it with the world... Create a community of like-minded individuals to build something bigger than you can build yourself... Give away your inventions and STILL help your company make more $ than it's made before... Maybe it's time to hang up the heels and go back into the cube...