Chris Ratcliffe (Solaris marketing), Tom Goguen (his boss), Josh Berkus (Postgres engineering), and I, had a nice dinner with some customers and the press on Monday to talk about the 1 year anniversary of OpenSolaris and some other interesting Solaris facts & figures. The round-up below:

• OpenSolaris Celebrates First Anniversary
• OpenSolaris: Success Story, or Too Soon to Say?
• Sun's 5,000 layoffs and 5 million OpenSolaris downloads
• Sun CEO will announce thousands of layoffs this Thursday
• Sun Solaris Embraces PostgreSQL
• OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up
• OpenSolaris Turns One
• Happy Birthday OpenSolaris

We didn't talk at all about the pending lay-offs. First, it's not appropriate, and second, we don't know a damn thing about them. But it looks like some reporters haven't forgotten the first rule of journalism: Open with a title that will hook the reader. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

OpenSolaris: One Year Down, Participation Up

For the record, I wasn't going to guess how many lines of codes are in OpenSolaris. Ratcliffe threw that 5 million lines number out there. Still, it's a good article. Thanks, Timothy!

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One year. Wow. It feels so much longer.

So much has happened over the past year. What's gone right? What's gone wrong? What blew me away? What depressed the hell out of me?

Well, what went right is that we started conversations, conversations with folks that have never talked to Sun before. We're going places we've never been. We've raised awareness. The biggest worry I had just before the launch was, what if nobody noticed or cared? Well, that certainly wasn't the case!

What went wrong? Not much actually. I credit that to our pilot program, the CAB, and all of our supporters out there. Of course, my fabulous team played a big part. They delivered -- and how.

Of course, I was hoping we would have the source code management solution up and running by now, but the transition is turning out to be harder than we thought. That's not a "gone wrong" thing, but a "hasn't happened as fast as I'd hoped" thing. Nevertheless, we're making good progress and the betas are up on our web site.

What blew me away? Winning the SIIA Codie Award for best open source solution. Our traction with universities have blown me away as well. Thirty-two universities are using OpenSolaris in their cirriculum. Five are Centers of Excellence.

What's depressed me? Well... nothing. (OK, there was this record rainfall in March that depressed the hell out of me, truth be told.)

Finally, I want to thank everyone out there that believes in OpenSolaris. We couldn't have done this alone.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

OpenSolaris one year on: Success or failure?

If you have to ask, you haven't been participating!

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The deadline for the CoolThreads Contest, which I'll be helping to judge, has been extended to May 28, 2006. If you're not familiar with the CoolThreads Contest, it's a contest for the highest performing, most scalable, and most creative Solaris 10 application. The four first round winners will each receive a T2000. The grand prize winner will receive US$50,000 in hard, cool, cash.

Get your entry in now: http://www.java.net/request_project_form.csp. The first round winners will be announced in June. The grand prize winner in August.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

2006 SIIA Codie Award for Best Open Source Solution: OpenSolaris!

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Today at JavaOne, Sun is announcing a new license for Java. Beginning today, OpenSolaris and Linux distributions will be allowed to redistribute the Java SE 5.0 JDK and JRE. The open source communities can define the packaging, installation, and support for the JDK within their distribution.

Sun is also opening a new community project on https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/ to help distribution providers with problems, questions, etc. Check it out if you're interested in redistributing Java....

Full press release is here.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

JavaOne is this week in San Francisco. One new, and very cool, thing this year is the Freedom Toaster. Sun, along with the Shuttleworth Foundation, is loading up Sun servers with a bunch of freeware. These servers are part of kiosks in Khayelitsha and other townships in South Africa that allow citizens there to easily get copies of the freeware. It's difficult to get internet access in South Africa, so many folks there don't have ready access to freeware. These kiosks allow them to get the software they want and need, free and easy.

Check out http://www.freedomtoaster.org/ for more information on the Freedom Toaster project, and if you're at JavaOne this week, register for Simon Phipps's talk about the Freedom Toaster at http://freedomtoaster.gobof.org/. The talk is on Wednesday at 7:00 pm, Moscone Convention Center, Room 123.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Look for our own Simon Phipps on the new BBC documentary, The Code Breakers.

Maybe he'll finally explain his fascination with minks.....

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I've known Stuart Cohen for a few years now. Nice guy, smart, but buddy, you got a few things wrong in your latest article. I'll talk about the things I know best and let my colleagues (and the readers' comments) correct the rest. Specifically, I'll address the following:

"You see, Sun wrote its own open-source license. It's a license that many in the open-source community don't like, and with good reason. Unlike with Linux, all the rights to any changes to the source code for Solaris go back to Sun. So any developers contributing to Solaris are literally working for Sun for free."

CDDL is just the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with two changes: patent grants and the ability to combine CDDL files with files under different licenses. To say we wrote it is at best a stretch and certainly a disservice to the Mozilla community. (For a complete run down of what CDDL is and isn't, see Simon Phipps' blog.)

The second part I'll pick on is that you all are working for Sun for free. Well, yeah. CDDL, like MPL, is copyleft, i.e., any changes you make go back out to the community. So, just like all of you are working for Sun for free, Sun is paying all of its engineers to work for you as well. Changes to OpenSolaris not only benefit us, they benefit everyone who uses our code, including all of the downstream distributions: Schillix, Nexenta, BeleniX, and marTux.

This isn't different from Linux; it's the same. Any changes you make to Linux go to Red Hat. You're working for free for Red Hat -- and SUSE, and Gentoo, and .... This is the point of open source. It helps everyone. No one single company is given an advantage over another.

And we're fine with that.

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Google's Summer of Code is "a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects." OpenSolaris is now one of those projects, so if you're a student, and you want to get paid for working on OpenSolaris, head on over to http://code.google.com/soc/opsol/about.html.

Registration opens May 1st.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

The 2nd Edition of Solaris Internals is now done. It's now been broken into two volumes, the first around the kernel itself, and the second around administration and performance. You can find more at Jim and Richard's web site: http://www.solarisinternals.com/si/index.php.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

I'm having another one of those "WTF?" moments. It's due this time to the quotes from Ron Hovsepian, COO of Novell, over OpenSolaris:

"The whole spirit of open source is to have one base of code. Open-sourcing Solaris - while it's appreciated that you can see the low-level pieces of code - doesn't move the overall effort of the open-source community further down the track. It creates a fork, which none of us likes."

So... then we should just get rid of either Gnome or KDE? Oh, and why have FreeBSD and NetBSD? Does this mean Novell is going to finally get rid of Evolution because Thunderbird does email so much better? Yeah, I thought not.

Sheesh, Ron, get a clue, buddy.....

P.S. I'm rather proud, and a little surprised, that Jonathan reads the OpenSolaris discussion board. Way to go, Jonathan!

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

I had this article forwarded to me this morning. My reaction? WTF?!

Tradeware is moving away from Solaris to Red Hat because Solaris isn't open source? Jordan Greenberg, either our field, marketing, and PR people aren't doing their jobs, or you have some other motive. Given the amount of press we've had on opening Solaris, I think our people are doing a fine job. They may be valid motives, but the ones listed in the article are not.

Solaris is open source. Solaris is free. And you can modify it however you like.

So, Jordan, what is it about Solaris you really don't like? Let me know. I've got a little bit of pull with the Solaris team. :-)

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OpenSolaris is one of the 6 2006 SIIA Codie Award finalists in the Best Open Source Solution category. Rock on!

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