My first trip back to the Mothership
As a recent member of the Sun diaspora I made my first trip back to the Bay Area last week. I took the "nerd bird" from Austin and arrived bright and early Monday morning. I came out to give a couple of presentations and sync up with Ian Murdock. The trip went well and I packed a bunch into my three days there. Here are some highlights:
OS Ambassadors
Monday afternoon Simon
and I presented to the OS Ambassadors, Sun's top OS SE's from around
the world. The ambassadors had gathered for their biannual week-long
conference where they sync up with all thats going on around the
company. Simon took them through his FOSS pitch and I detailed
our GNU/Linux business. We got quite a bit of interest in both
topics.
Turns out that we were the warm-up act for Jonathan Schwartz who spent about 5 minutes on prepared remarks and then fielded questions from the audience. He was his usual eloquent and laid back self. He in turn was the warm up act for the Bryan and Mike show. To call these guys, particularly Bryan, high-energy would be a severe understatement. They regaled the crowd with tales of the extremely cool stuff they've been working on for the past year and were highly entertaining.
Presenting to Senior Software Execs: Of Sticky Notes and Free Software
Wednesday afternoon the FOSS team got to brief our top Software Execs on the status of what we've been working on. David Marr, our team's legal dude and one of Sun's representatives on committee B, and I presented on our relationship with the Free Software Foundation as well as GPL version 3. As luck would have it, the morning of the preso the latest draft of GPLv3 was released to the public so David got to scramble and revise his preso for the afternoon.
David drew on a host of high tech props including dollar
bills, Post-it notes
and notebook paper to get across the finer points of patent
licensing. (Needless to say, going forward we wont be accepting any
Post it notes from 3M that are not GPLv3)
David Marr, with the help of volunteer Jean
Elliott, explaining the nuances of patent licensing (Note: Jean did
not get to keep the dollar).
My Dinners with Ian
Both nights I was there I got to dine with Ian (the first also included a whole gaggle of Sun luminaries such as Tim Bray, Josh Berkus, Simon, Bryan, Mike etc as sort of an unofficial welcome to Sun for Ian). I've been very impressed with how rational Ian comes across and his clarity around where he wants to go. Im glad he's on our team.
And speaking of GPLv3
When I ran into our fearless leader on campus I was good naturedly harangued regarding the GPLv3 shirt that I had promised him -- I told him the shirt was in the mail.
To be clear: In order for Sun to make a final decision on GPLv3 two things need to first happen 1) the final draft needs to be published and evaluated and 2) the shirt needs to be wicked cool.
The view of the estuary outside my hotel.
Pau for now..
