The Observation Deck

Views on software from Bryan Cantrill's deck chair

Monday March 19, 2007

Ian Murdock joins Sun!

I know that I've been quiet for a while, and I promise that I (or rather, we) are close to talking about what we've been up to for the past year, but I wanted to first pop my head up to to highlight out some exciting news: Ian Murdock has joined Sun.

I have always been impressed with Ian's decidedly pragmatic views of technology; he has been a supporter of OpenSolaris, and in particular he took a decisive and courageous stand against some absurd Debian-borne anti-Nexenta licensing FUD. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that our OpenSolaris/Debian fantasia was not even two years ago, and that it was just eighteen months ago that we first saw a prototype of what that Utopia might look like. Ian's arrival at Sun is a huge lurch forward towards the wide-spread productization of this ideal: it's great news for OpenSolaris and it's great news for long-time fans of Debian -- it looks like we're going to be able to apt-get our cake, and DTrace it too!

(2007-03-19 11:44:17.0/2007-03-19 10:44:17.0) Permalink Comments [6]

Comments:

Now if only Murdock will have sway on the Sun packaging gurus... :-)

Posted by Jason Williams on March 19, 2007 at 11:56 AM PDT #

that plus a user selectable gnu userland. oh my. open solaris developer edition, plus the few apt-get commands needed to get sudo, top et al...

Posted by paul kent on March 19, 2007 at 03:23 PM PDT #

Awesome!

Posted by Dennis on March 19, 2007 at 04:41 PM PDT #

Uh, do you realize you have one flickr photo? Like only one. I know a lot of people with zero flickr photos and a ton more with thousands. You are the only I know with only one.

It was my harassment this weekend that got you to post this, wasn't it? Admit it. I should get credit for this post and by association, I deserve credit for Ian joining Sun. Where would Sun be without me?

Posted by Scott Johnston on March 19, 2007 at 08:37 PM PDT #

Scott, to paraphrase a retort of mine from many years ago: the only thing more pathetic than just having one flickr photo would be subscribing to the flickr feed of someone who has just one flickr photo. Cough. As for the shaming, it's true: after you harassed me, I went through my little black book of techno-celebrities, looking for someone -- anyone -- to come to Sun so that I could just blog about it and you would get off my case. Frankly, by the time I got to the M's I was beginning to sweat a little; thank God Ian picked up the phone!

Posted by Bryan Cantrill on March 19, 2007 at 11:55 PM PDT #

Your comments give me hope that the package management in Solaris will be addressed. Running Ubuntu and Nexenta next to Solaris systems really shows that Solaris is years behind the competition. I think Nexenta really highlights the benefits that a modern package management system can bring to the table, and whats more it is a joy to use. A credit to Erast, Alex and the rest of the team. Wish Ian the best of luck.

Posted by Sean Clarke on March 20, 2007 at 03:31 AM PDT #

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