Casper Dik's Weblog

Saturday April 09, 2005

Open Solaris CAB It has been a busy week flying to SFO and having our first CAB meeting. The first good thing that happened was that KLM had finally changed the aging and horrible MD11 for shiny new Boeing 777s with personal video. I have a bit of a problem with the new immigration procedures, and I like the Brazilian's government stand on this.
I had met Rich Teer fleetingly before in the hallways of the Menlo Park Campus so he recognized me when we checked in at the same time; we probably were on the same BART train from the airport. But I had never met the others. I feel we have a great team with very many different competences, from Roy Fielding's experience with Apache's governance model, Simon Phipps' tireless evangelism. And Al Hopper with his tireless Solaris on x86 enthusiasm. Rich Teer, a SPARC fan, and accomplished author and myself as Solaris engineering representative, being the more technical side of things.
Are we just marketing as the Register would have it? No, we're very serious about it. Is the CAB just a bunch of YES-men? Can we get the respect of our community if we are?
Sun takes both Open Solaris and the independence from Sun serious; Jonathan Schwartz came to meet us but none of the other executives was allowed at our meeting. He talked to us at length and was very serious about clearing up the roadblocks that we had already determined to be on the path to OpenSolaris. It is clear that they want us to succeed and want us to independent. Jonathan even stayed for lunch.
The Sun press conference we took part in was a first for me. The press was not hostile and mostly asked questions which were to the point; some more than others.
We have a lot of work to do and will do most of it in email on a publicly readable mailing list.
The second day we listened to Jonathan's keynote at the OSBC conference and spend the afternoon doing interviews with the press followed by a press reception and Sun engineering diner/Open Solaris launch party at Lulu's. And guess what, we were able to make the Americans walk all over town, the itenary was all "5 min cab ride" and some such nonsense.
On the final day I took Ben Rockwood's advice and tried out "Clam chowder in sourdough" after taking the cable car to lombard street and walking down to the harbor. The weather was gorgeous, the same cannot be said of the weather in Amsterdam which is now unseasonably cold.
(2005-04-09 05:44:32.0) Permalink Comments [3]