As part of our announcement of the Community Advisory Board this week, we flew all the members into San Francisco for dinner and their first meeting. During dinner, I heard from someone that there was a general concern over me leading the OpenSolaris group. Since I once ran software engineering for Cobalt, and obviously Cobalt was the organization that killed Solaris x86, then is it wise to have me running OpenSolaris?

First, a little history about me at Sun. I joined Sun in 1996 as an engineer working on Solstice Enterprise Manager. A couple of years later, I became a manager in the Solaris Internet Engineering group. My group was responsible for IPv6 and IPsec among other goodies for Solaris 8.

After Cobalt was acquired by Sun, I was asked to lead the software group there. Our job was continuing the appliance line started by Cobalt. Sun wanted to get into the low-end appliance business and it saw that acquiring Cobalt was the easiest and fastest way to do that. Cobalt was never out to destroy Solaris x86. Truth of the matter is, Cobalt just ignored Solaris, and Solaris ignored Cobalt. Now the shocking news was that Solaris x86 was put on hold by the Solaris group itself. (We like to say "put on hold" instead of "killed" because Solaris x86 was never officially killed. Although it wasn't listed on the pricebooks, engineering continued to support it and test builds with it.)

With the declining price and increasing power of general purpose x86 servers, the demand for specialized appliances dropped. Sun responded by using the Cobalt team to create their own general purpose x86 servers, and the LX50 was born. My team was now called the Linux Software Engineering team. Solaris x86 was back (with a vengeance!) and Sun was now selling Solaris for SPARC and x86 along side Linux (Red Hat and SUSE). At the engineering level, we pretty much continued to ignore each other. Things were different, however, with executives at the various companies where a rivalry blossomed.

Now I'm here with the OpenSolaris team. I think one of the reasons I was chosen for this role is my knowledge and experience with open source and the open source community. My own personal belief is that an operating system is like a (software) language or a software license: You pick the best tool for the job. We think we have a mighty damn fine tool with OpenSolaris. And later this quarter when we open the Solaris kernel up, you can see for yourself. We hope you agree.

I've been asked for some time to start a blog. My standard answer has always been, "What would I talk about that someone like Jim hasn't already covered?"

That worked until this week at OSBC. When I gave my standard answer to Ben Rockwood, he agreed with me, but then added that with my own blog, my own viewpoint will show through. Information and events are repeated throughout blogs, but each one carries the writer's own personal style, their opinions on the matter. It was an argument I couldn't easily dismiss.

So here I am. You may not learn anything new about the industry from reading my blog, but maybe you'll learn something about me.