Sunday May 22, 2005 | Claire's Alternate Version of Reality Blogged by Claire Giordano |
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Just last week, thanks to Sara Dornsife, I discovered the irreverant Jack, whereas Doc Searls posted a link on his IT Garage last summer! "Inside Jack" is a laugh-out-loud flash-toon series about a coder named Jack (and "no, he will not fix your computer.") The irreverance, the creativity and the love of parody is one of the things that I like about Sun. After all, if you're not having fun when you're working hard, what is the #@*& point? #1 - The first Inside Jack flash-toon is about the controversial, ill-understood Sun/Microsoft agreement. (Love you, man.) #2 - This is my absolute favorite - an Inside Jack about Solaris 10. (Gold star to the first person who guesses who Mikey is.) #3 - Inside Jack - Episode 3 is about the phenomenal Sun/AMD partnership. (Talk about a marriage made in heaven!) [Update on 5/22/05: Latest Inside Jack now available at:] #4 - Dual Core Sun Fire V40Z. And just remember - no animals were injured in the creation of the Inside Jack flash animation. :-) Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris (2005-05-22 09:40:16.0) Permalink Comments [4] About screencasts, del.icio.us and thlinking (no typo) I've been trying to explain the beauty and the benefits of del.icio.us to folks, and want to share a link to Jon Udell's killer screencast that does it so very well. Udell's screencast is a powerful combination of storytelling and demo. Worth a few moments - do check it out. And, if a software service causes someone like James Governor to propose adding a new word to the lexicon ("thlinking"), well, it's worth paying attention to. In fact, the ability to annotate a bookmark in del.icio.us with a quick one-liner explaining why you think the link matters and why someone else should care (get it? think + link = thlink) is one of the features I like best - combined with the ability to see how many other people think that bookmark matters and what they've annotated the link with. James' bottom-line comment in his blog on thlinking: "What's my point? Insights don't need 100 pages, or even 10 pages, or even one page, to explain. Sometimes you just need to point at something and say why you're doing so." Back to Udell's screencast. Being of sound mind, I had an epiphany[1] as soon as I saw the screencast - we should be creating screencasts for some of the cool features in Solaris (and OpenSolaris). Imagine if more people could see the users (or even the authors) of software demo it, complete with their personal stories about why it matters? To have software demonstrated by someone who truly "gets it" and can help you understand the benefits - well, that's gotta be useful. It turns out that Jon Udell recently wrote about the value of screencasts here and that Curt Hibbs has also blogged 'Screencasts - A better way to "get" it' as well. Curt even links to a movie that he suggests had a lot to do with the wildfire spread of Ruby on Rails. And Roman Strobl has already experimented with some audio-tracked flash demo's on his blog here. The idea is clearly catching on... I particularly like what Jon says in PrimeTime Hypermedia about how screencasting can empower people who "get" a piece of software: "It may, however, be obvious how to use a piece of software, and yet not at all obvious why to use it. I'll give you two examples: Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Anyone who approaches either of these applications will immediately grasp their basic modes of use. That's the easy part. The hard part is understanding what they're about, and why they matter." So - OpenSolaris engineers and fans - I entreat you - make some cool OpenSolaris screencasts, and spread the word. (And send me links, too!) [1] Truth be told, the epiphany didn't happen until after I saw the screencast with audio enabled - the audio function is fried on my current Tecra laptop. :-) Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris Technorati Tag: del.icio.us (2005-05-16 11:36:35.0) Permalink Comments [1] Tim Marsland posted his first blogs the other day (three in his first day!) and I have to say I was filled with glee when he told me about it. I'd like more people to get to know Tim. He is a fountain of ideas, he was the driving force behind the AMD64 work in Solaris 10, and he's a pleasure to work with. Working with Tim to solve a problem is like meandering through the woods - along the way, you explore all sorts of possibilities and at the end, you're richer for the experience. Tim was one of the key people who convinced me to lead OpenSolaris. Oh, and he has a wonderful British accent thing going for him, too. One other important thing to know about Tim: He loves Lego. As a software engineer, well, I guess that's not surprising. After all, with Lego, as with software, you can build amazing things out of basic components and building blocks. And Tim loves to build amazing things. Don't we all? Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris (2005-05-12 00:15:09.0) Permalink Comments [2] History in the Making - First OpenSolaris User Group History in the making - the First OpenSolaris User Group will meet this evening Tue, April 26th at 7:30pm PST in Santa Clara, California in the upstairs room of the SCA03 "Auditorium" building on the Sun Santa Clara (Agnews) Campus. Alan DuBoff is pulling it all together and is quite excited about it. If you've ever met Alan, well, you know that when he's passionate, his emotions just bubble over. In a good way. Liane Praza will be the first guest speaker. Liane is smart, funny, an amazing engineer and (to draw a picture) has a penchant for colorful hair dye. I had the pleasure of being on Liane's management team for almost 5 years and I'd recruit her again in a heartbeat. (But I don't need to right now, obviously.) Liane will be talking about Solaris 10's new Service Management Facility aka SMF. Good stuff. Bonus - Jan Setje-Eilers will also give a short demo of the New Boot Architecture for Solaris on x86/x64. Check it out! Directions, map, and information about SWAG are all available on Alan's blog. Oh, and of course, this is not the only OpenSolaris User Group - others are in the planning in other locations and geos. Stay tuned for more. (And no, I don't expect to be the fountain of future OpenSolaris User Group info. I'm just putting in a plug since Jim Grisanzio, the OpenSolaris community manager, if off getting ready to have a baby. Good luck to Jim and his lovely wife!) I'm a big fan of Google maps, not just for technical reasons, but more for how Google has enabled us to answer new types of questions - such as "where are all the preschools in menlo park?" Good stuff. So, drumroll please, here's a link to the Google map for the Santa Clara SC03 Auditorium for tonight's User Group. Come join the engineers! ![]() Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris (2005-04-26 11:52:30.0) Permalink The Flickr team loves fan art - check it out. Cool stuff. I just noticed this post to the Flickr blog by co-founder Caterina Fake. We OpenSolaris folk like fan art, too. Well, at least I do. If any of you have any cool art that pays homage to OpenSolaris, let me know! Better yet, if you post the fan art to Flickr and use the "opensolaris" tag, and perhaps also a "fan-art" tag - then we can all pay homage to your creativity. Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris Thanks to Erik Kastner and his Spell-with-Flikr tool for the gorgeous letters above. (2005-04-24 22:36:46.0) Permalink Solaris BOFs Just Keep Going and Going... Why do Solaris-related BOFs always run so late at night? Last Wednesday night, I kissed my children good night and drove down to Santa Clara to attend the MySQL and Solaris 10 BOF which Dan Price was hosting, part of the MySQL Users Conference. I arrived a bit early for the BOF, and luck was with me - the MySQL conference Quiz Show was still going on. I sat next to Gina Blaber who is Director of Conferences at O'Reilly, got to hear an excellent rendition of a Pope joke by Kaj Arno of MySQL (he's got the voice for comedy), and watch a contest in which the losers won books and the winners won t-shirts. Kind of a strange twist for an O'Reilly conference, huh? Alan DuBoff took some excellent photos at the Solaris BOF (well, except for the one of me - ick) and there were several other engineers in the crowd to help answer questions, too - Jonathan Adams, Andrei Dorofeev, Eric Saxe. Stephen Harpster (a newly minted blogger!) was there from OpenSolaris as well. The Best Part of the BOF: the questions, the interest, the conversation. (Oh, and Dan did a great job leading the discussion. Perhaps we can get him to post some of his slides on his blog?) Anyway, I finally got a good night's sleep last night, so I'm now recovered from the late-night Solaris BOF. The late-night aspect has become standard operating procedure for us - which I'm actually quite jazzed about - since it gives evidence to the fact that there is a community of motivated, interested, enthusiastic engineers who want to be part of OpenSolaris. Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris (2005-04-23 16:24:16.0) Permalink Simon Phipps on Open Source Licensing If you've ever met Simon Phipps, you'll know that he's articulate and intelligent and committed to evangelizing things he is passionate about - including things open source. He was one of the driving forces behind the Chairman's Award winning blogs.sun.com effort which has enabled many passionate and committed folks from Sun to connect to peers and customers in an altogether new way. Simon sports a beard and one of those British accents that we Yankees find so charming. And, this past weekend, he posted an excellent writeup on open source licensing, CDDL and the current OSI debate about license proliferation - titled Failed as in succeeded wildly. It's well worth the time to read. Check it out. Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:Solaris (2005-04-18 16:52:11.0) Permalink Comments [1] CDDL - Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? The CDDL open source license certainly seems to be misunderstood by a few vocal critics, although it's also been positively assessed by some respected open source leaders as well. I led the team that created the CDDL open source license and am simultaneously flattered by all the attention and shocked at some of the ludicrous things that I've read. Geez. Thanks to Andy for correcting some of the misconceptions. The controversy reminds me of the mantra I've written about before - although it makes me want to change it to: "It's not about the license, it's about the community." That it takes a community to build good software is worth repeating. Our success in building the OpenSolaris community will have less to do with the open source license and more to do with our ability to attract developers, to convince the market that OpenSolaris is real and to spread the word about the OpenSolaris innovations. (Perhaps we'll need to get some of those nifty Get Firefox buttons and banners for OpenSolaris to help spread the word...) The core OpenSolaris team realized early in the planning for OpenSolaris that we needed to use a "true" open source license - a license that complies with the terms of the Open Source Definition and that encourages royalty-free use, modification and distribution. It took others inside Sun a bit longer. If I were better at recounting stories, perhaps I could tell the then-dramatic (now kind of boring and corporate in retrospect) tale of the OpenSolaris licensing debate that took place inside Sun before CDDL existed. There were some influential and intelligent people who wanted us to use what I call a "half-pregnant" source license, in which the source would only be "open" for non-commercial use and a licensee would have to pay for commercial use of the technology. Ick. (Obviously we did not follow this path...) There were others inside Sun who pushed hard for GPL. For a brief two week period, I was also one of the GPL lobbyists, until I realized how important it was for us to allow OpenSolaris kernel source files to be compiled and linked with other open source files and even with proprietary source files in the kernel. GPL would not allow this. On Day 1 of OpenSolaris, because some OpenSolaris IP is encumbered by other companies (example - 3rd party drivers), we're going to have some source files in the kernel that will remain proprietary. Hence GPL was out of the running. We also looked carefully at the BSD family of licenses. After all, Solaris has its roots in BSD source code. Concerns about the lack of an explicit patent grant in the BSD license aside, a few of us strongly felt that if someone makes modifications to OpenSolaris source files and then distributes those modifications, they should "share" the modifications they made to the source files. (Note - if they author new code, in separate source files, and distribute the resulting binaries but want to keep the new source files private, that's fine with us.) The BSD license has few terms, and the requirement to "share" modifications definitely isn't one of them. So, ultimately, BSD was out of the running as well. The MPL class of open source license (on which CDDL is based) had a number of attractions. First, it does require that the source code for modifications be shared. Second, it allows the covered source files to be mixed with other open source files and with proprietary source files. It also has an explicit patent grant. Keeping in mind that we want businesses and startups and developers to feel comfortable that they don't just have a copyright grant but also a patent grant, this mattered to us. We also felt that having some kind of "anti-patent litigation" provision (as sometimes seen in the Mozilla class of licenses) was also valuable. My small team couldn't fix the patent problem (although Larry Lessig has called on all of us to speak up and help here, as he lambasted Verizon, Disney and Microsoft for their "war against the freedom to innovate" at the recent OSBC.) But my team could take steps to make sure that the OpenSolaris license discouraged patent litigation. As Danese Cooper aptly described the CDDL "patent peace" provision - "if you pee in the pool, you have to get out." So, if you choose to initiate a patent claim that involves OpenSolaris CDDL software, all the rights you've received to the CDDL OpenSolaris technology from all the OpenSolaris community members is severed - you effectively have to get out of the pool. Unfortunately, we could not use the MPL for OpenSolaris. Open source licensing has evolved a bit in recent years and we needed to make some adjustments. In doing so, we bent over backwards to craft a license that would be useful not only to OpenSolaris but to the broader open source community - we did not want to create yet another vanity license. Perhaps we could have stayed off the radar screen by simply revising the Sun Public License (our very own vanity license, a clone of the MPL) - but I didn't want other companies to have to create yet another MPL-derived vanity license to fix some of these same issues. Of course, some projects will want to use the respected Apache license, or a BSD license, or GPL - but for those projects that want to use an MPL-class license, well, I wanted CDDL to be an attractive option. Hence we created a common MPL-class open source license, in which the license steward could not change the terms out from underneath a community. As some members of the open source community will tell you - John Cowan, Chuck Swiger, Rod Dixon and Danese Cooper of OSI, and I would hope even PJ of Groklaw would confirm - we revised CDDL in response to community input last December. And if it turns out that we've overlooked something that requires further improvement in CDDL, do let me know, so that we can deal with it. In the meantime, "it's not about the license, it's about the community" - so I'm going to focus on that just now rather than let myself be distracted by what Tim Bray calls the bad craziness. Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:CDDL (2005-04-18 00:25:30.0) Permalink Comments [10] I'll be at OSBC in San Francisco next week (the 2nd annual Open Source Business Conference organized by Matt Asay.) Sun's very own Jonathan Schwartz will be
keynoting
the event on Tue Apr 5th at 9:30am with a talk titled, "Building Billion Dollar Businesses with Open
Source and Open Communities." Andy Tucker (Sun Distinguished Engineer and OpenSolaris technical lead) will also be on a panel discussion titled "Can Open Source Innovate?" on Wed Apr 6th at 2:30pm - this is part of the "Emerging Opportunities" session track. Finally, I'm pretty sure that one of my colleagues helped to fund the 6pm reception on Tue night of the conference, so if you're around and want to join in the conversation, please drop by around 6pm for some free and hopefully delicious (no pun to Josh S.) drinks and appetizers. Hope to see you there! ![]() Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: Solaris (2005-04-01 15:07:00.0) Permalink Comments [1] Fingerprints Left Behind by Danese A big thank you to Danese Cooper for all of the heavy lifting she's done in the open source arena for Sun and for the open source community. It's been a privilege and a pleasure to work with Danese from the day we met back in the fall of 2003. She's smart, articulate, funny, knowledgeable and yes, a bit, ahem, unusual. I will miss her (although her cell phone number is imprinted on my mind, just as concretely as the number 8675309, and I suspect we'll be talking more rather than less.) I'm not the only one who will miss Danese - Jim said it well here over the weekend. It's so very true about the cell phone, and the knitting, and the bag. And don't forget the hats! (hand-knit, of course.) I'm fond of lists - writing lists and crossing things off of lists, both lists to-do and lists of things already done. Thanks to Erik Kastner and his Spell-with-Flikr tool, here's a colorful list of a few of the areas Danese has left her tellltale fingerprints. Take care, Danese! ![]() (2005-03-21 12:20:08.0) Permalink Buzz about Solaris in a Buzz Prediction Market At the O'Reilly ETech conference in San Diego this week. One intriguing research project that Gary William Flake of Yahoo Research Labs pitched appeals to my on-the-record fascination with the The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (who incidentally will be speaking at ETech tomorrow.) ![]() The joint Yahoo/O'Reilly research project is called the "Tech Buzz Game". From the Yahoo website: "The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you "put your play money where your mouth is."" Before Gary even had a chance to finish his 15 minute pitch, many of us in the audience already had logins and were already investing our imaginary $10,000. Due in good part to my significant investment in Solaris, I have been ranked twice today as one of the leaders in this buzz prediction market (the first time I was ranked #13, currently #21.) How cool is that? I also applaud how attentive to open source issues the Yahoo and O'Reilly folks are. They are hip to the market changing OpenSolaris effort - on their "Markets" page they have a "Sun vs. Red Hat" choice between Red Hat and Solaris with the description: "Sun intends to put the heat on Red Hat with the release of Open Solaris." Of course, as Jonathan has said to IDG News and Jim Grisanzio has blogged, we in OpenSolaris do not have Linux centered in our sights. Our #1 competitor for Solaris is, quite simply, Windows. (I personally think Linux has changed the competitive landscape in the operating systems world in some hugely positive ways.) And, more importantly, we are simply trying to making the pretty-darn-amazing Solaris technology available to more and more people, to provide choice for customers and to stimulate innovation through the benefits of competition. All good things, to me at least. Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: Solaris Technorati Tag: etech (2005-03-15 16:32:30.0) Permalink I Cannot Pretend to Feel Impartial About Open Source Stephen O'Grady's latest tecosystems writeup is a worthwhile read for those of you interested in open source. Oh, and you just have to love the title - "What We Talk About When We Talk About Open Source". Sure, it's provocative, and it's bound to raise some eyebrows, and possibly step on some toes, but the underlying message about choice and competition (that both are ultimately a good thing) are sentiments that I wholeheartedly agree with. And if any of you want to ding me for ending the previous sentence with a preposition, I am reminded of another Winston Churchill quote: "From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put." (2005-02-15 00:16:45.0) Permalink Comments [3] One of the main points John drilled into that day is a mantra that I have since used in every OpenSolaris presentation (of which there were many, to build the momentum for OpenSolaris inside Sun): "It's not about the source, it's about the conversation." After all, it's easy to focus on the source, and the tools, and the (gasp) license, and all the other tangibles involved in open source. At the end of the day, though, the true measure of success for OpenSolaris will be the community. There is a vibrant and enthusiastic OpenSolaris community today. Will the OpenSolaris community of tomorrow be bigger? Actively involved in the "conversation" with each other? Will a community development model enable innovation in new areas? Will OpenSolaris become a more attractive platform for coursework and research in Computer Science departments? Will startups embed OpenSolaris into their products? How many bookshelves at Powell's will be filled with books on OpenSolaris? How useful will the opensolaris.org website be as a forum for collaboration and discussion? There are a lot of talented people both inside and outside Sun who are committed to building and strengthening the OpenSolaris community. In a big way. That's good news for customers (current and prospective.) It's also good news for developers and entrepreneurs and professors and TAs. Oh, and lest we forget - "It's not about the source, it's about the conversation." ![]() Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris (2005-02-08 16:08:23.0) Permalink "Cooperation isn't very motivating. It's a lot more fun to compete. It's good to have competing projects; it keeps everybody honest. If you try to unify too much, people get lazy because they don't see anyone nipping at their heels."
It's healthy that there are competing operating
systems and that we push each other to perform and excel. And of
course, the nice side effect of competition is choice for customers, which I
believe to be a very good thing. No business wants the
inflexibility that goes along with a single solution,
especially when that implies higher costs and less innovation. Huge Thank You to OpenSolaris! I hope to see all sorts of unpredicted (and predictable) consequences - startups we might never have imagined, academic research that changes the field, tips in the market, computer gaming technology that I hope my children never play with, new business models that thrive, better and better and better driver support, more compelling developer tools, governments that get the benefits of the Solaris technology along with the value of open source, and in the end, most importantly - more compelling choices for our Sun customers, new and old. I have miles to go before I sleep, but first I must send a HUGE thank you for yesterday, and some shiny gold stars, to: ![]() IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Karyn, for tonic, and herding cats with a resilience that would astound Danese, a teacher, for her articulate sense of community and voice Bonnie, for windex editing and persistence Alan, for perl tools extraordinaire Jim, for your tireless work with the community and true-blue blog Derek, for your calmness in the face of yet another (and another!) change Andy, for your brilliant judgement and keeping two feet on the ground Mike_S, for editing extraordinaire Keith, for a refreshing and new perspective Linda, for working the details Lonee, for a million hidden things of great value MikeK, for patience and buildable source Bart, for a decade of positive support and early doom testing Adam, Eric and the rest of the gang who went to oscon to converse Teresa, for whistling in organization, structure and can-do spirit Bryan, for DTrace, and for your spirited ... thoughts on licensing Dan, for your price-less and insightful late-night suggestions. DavidC, for wisdom shared in a box with 4 wheels JBeck, for sending mail and for driving to contribute Kamal, for diligence and details and patience and focus Sara, for brilliant writing and an energetic bunny full of ideas Allen, for foley editing for the website JoanneW, for the fastest site turnaround since the ok corrale to the Volume Manager and Resource Mgmt families - my extended work family - for your patience with us Ann, for working the numbers Folks from across Sun on the council, including the special university folk... And to all of you who have helped with the housecleaning - you know who you are SUPPORTING CAST Tim and Stephen, for divine inspiration and coaching AndyR, SteveU, GaryD, JonW, GerryW for the salad days JohnnyL, for your vision and for pulling my leg John, for late night emails and the source != conversation mantra Evan, for all the early consultation (and long-ago powder) Glenn, for all your support Will, for your super secret magic powers MikeH, for the long talks and rocky mountains Matt and team, for your experience and expertise James, for moral support Hal, for inspiration and moneyball tip Ingrid, for your dedication and ideas Jonathan, for your unbottleable focus Tom, for the insanely new perspective EXPERTS Eileen, for all your advice, and your cell phone number, and always being just a phone call away Julie, for your analytical, patient, and detailed partnership with Bonnie Chris, for your articulate ability to debate and discuss Arien, for your dogged attention to details Tiki, for the lessons on names and late night responsiveness Virginia, for review - after review - after review - after review Karla, for sound editing Damien, for your time and commitment LICENSE CREW The CDDL team that I had the privilege to lead: Andy, Arien, Chris, Danese, Eileen, Mark, Vicki The OSI Board members with their willingness to review and help The OSI license-discuss community, especially John Cowan, Rod Dixon and Chuck Swiger Simon, for your open and cuddly input The Groklaw volunteers who chimed in with ideas and questions - especially PJ and marbux Mitchell, for the beautiful MPL which claimed a spot in the spectrum between BSD and GPL Early salad advisors on our requirements - Bill, Kathy, Ron, Rob... COMMUNITY MIXERS Everyone on the 16th floor sauna at OSCON for your ideas and passion Countless open source experts who patiently met with us, lunched with us, guided us... chromatic, Dale, Tim and all the great folks at O'Reilly, for the etching zoo All the customers and community members at our bofs, for your enthuasiasm and participation The folks at OSDL, for the long, long walk to lunch Bloggers, who aim to bring authentic voice to the world, especially the Sun bloggers, and Tim The Pilot Community members, whose names I won't list for privacy reasons, but whose enthusiasm is heartwarming Claeton and GG and M, for, well, everything that matters Undoubtedly I've left someone off the very long credits list. I'm happy to correct any omissions! Thanks. Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris (2005-01-26 23:49:56.0) Permalink |
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