Thursday October 06, 2005
Thursday October 06, 2005 
Our very own Jonathan Schwartz sat on a panel today with Mitchell Baker and Tim O'Reilly at John Battelle's Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco. All three were articulate, smart and provocative.
Of note: Tim pointed out that Jonathan is probably the most senior executive blogger out there, and pointed out that blogging takes time, and asked why Jonathan thinks the time is worth it. Jonathan's tongue-in-cheek reply was that blogging takes a lot less time than 1:1 interviews. His deeper answer - that there is an incredible power in community, that most people he knows in the software world make choices not based solely on economics but on philosophies and beliefs, that developers join things - they don't buy things. And that communication is a critical element in creating communities. So - he is communicating in his blog to help build a community around the Sun technology platform. And he readily stated that he's using the transparency of his blog as a competitive weapon. (And he named a few of his competitors that spend over 1/2 billion in advertising, instead.)
Of note: When asked about open source, Jonathan said that "Everything Sun does will be open source. Everything." And he advised other software companies to "Get to open source quickly. There is no downside that I can see. Get to free quickly. There is no downside that I can see." Bold statements.
Of note: Someone from the audience asked Jonathan about Solaris, all the great features in the latest version of Solaris (DTrace was named in the question), and how open source fits into that? The questioner wanted to know if the engineers are more inspired because they get to open the source? Jonathan answered by mentioning that DTrace is now being implemented in FreeBSD and that we're supporting that effort. Then he moved on to point out that there are 1000 Sun employees in the newly launched OpenSolaris community, and over 7900 community members from outside Sun. He thinks that's great. "Are Solaris developers feeling like they're responsible for everything? No." He mentioned the creation of an OpenSolaris governance process - and that Sun employees involved in Solaris are "having to learn that they're not going to be in control of everything. That's a good thing." He went on to use one of my favorite phrases - "Innovation happens elsewhere."
My thoughts: The question about Solaris would not have been on the radar screen 2 years ago. The combination of Solaris 10 innovations + disruptive free pricing of Solaris + open source via the OpenSolaris project have changed the landscape. Solaris and OpenSolaris are firmly on the radar screen for customers and developers and technologists. Especially when you consider the context - the Sun/AMD partnership, the 2004 acquisition of Andy Bechtolsheim's Kealia company, the new x64 Galaxy boxes from Bechtolsheim's team, Sun's commitment to management of your data and SarBox compliance, the throughput computing advances in the upcoming Niagara hardware, the Java ES platform, the promising announcement of a Sun/Google partnership...
As a result, the ecosystem for the Solaris platform and the OpenSolaris technology is growing, and fast. I loved the question. And I loved the level of detail and understanding in Jonathan's answer. The President of a 36,000 employee company knows about the port of the OpenSolaris DTrace software to FreeBSD - how cool is that!
Technorati Tag: Web 2.0
Technorati Tag: web2con
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-10-06 14:37:55.0) Permalink Comments [2]
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Claire, did you mean "over 10, 000" or 790 outside of Sun. I can't figure out the math with 1000 members with 7,900 of them being from outside of Sun :)
You've been a blogging busybody. Thanks for keeping us up to date on Web 2.0.
Posted by John Clingan on October 06, 2005 at 09:21 PM PDT #
Posted by Claire Giordano on October 06, 2005 at 09:45 PM PDT #