Tuesday April 26, 2005

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

Sunday April 24, 2005

Gotta Love Fan Art
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.

Saturday April 23, 2005

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

Monday April 18, 2005

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]

Friday April 01, 2005

OBSC in San Francisco Apr 5-6
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]