Tuesday November 15, 2005
Tuesday November 15, 2005 
The provocative title of "Was OpenSolaris a Mistake?" kept me away from Paul Murphy's blog entry for a few days, I admit. I'm usually lightning-quick to open a letter to discover its insides, regardless of whatever qualms I might have about the unknown (I'll never forget those much-anticipated college admission letters of decades past.. boy did those get opened quickly!) For some reason, I hesitated to read Paul's blog entry.
When I finally did read it, a big huge gigantic beaming smile slowly spread across my face. I love Paul's closing statement. Let me tell you why.
When I first started building the team to open source the Solaris Operating System (I was the senior manager in the Solaris engineering team given the "make it so" directive by Johnny Loiacono) I told the same story to all the candidates I interviewed:
"This project is full of challenges and obstacles and also tremendous opportunity. And no matter what the result, this project will be written up as business school case study. I don't know whether it will be a positive case study, or a negative one... But it WILL be a case study!"
So what was Paul Murphy's conclusion in the article? Here it is:
"So, bottom line: is openSolaris a mistake? Nope, it's business school 101 strategy in practice."
Emphasis and underlines all mine.
Paul gets the double-indirect strategy. Of course, the jury is still out on whether we will succeed in building this community - and community building takes a lot of hard work, sincerity and an ability to weather the storms along with the sunshine.
So, will OpenSolaris change the dynamics of the operating system space? Will more and more university computer science departments use OpenSolaris in their curriculum? Will developers get hooked on the benefits of DTrace? Time will tell. The early OpenSolaris numbers are quite encouraging, as are the early distributions based on the OpenSolaris code (SchilliX, BeleniX, Nexenta) and the fact that grassroots OpenSolaris User Groups have cropped up across 6 continents in the space of just 5 months. I for one believe that the OpenSolaris combination of technology and community will spawn all sorts of previously unimagined and creative endeavors. I await them with bated breath. Bring it on, folks!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-15 16:14:42.0) Permalink Comments [3]
