So I guess I have to expect the bad with the good, but calling JDS a " throw-away desktop"? Are you people not reading the press before you publish articles trashing us? Does Google News not exist where you live? Let me put on the cranky pants here....

Now, I've only been the director responsible for JDS at Sun for a few months now, so I admit I don't know the history around what promises were made to Tom and Sam. Sometimes things are beyond our control, but if we promised you something, we should have at least given you an explanation on why we had to break that promise. So if that's what happened, let me be the one to apologize.

As it happens, I'm also the director responsible for OpenSolaris. A "holy war on destroying Linux"?? Where the hell did that come from?! Working in the open source means you're going to have email flame wars. It's part of the business. And yes, if you have any "vulgar, profanity laced" emails from Sun engineers, I'd like to see them. I like to think our engineers are more professional than that. I can't control everything people say out there in the community, but Sun's position has never been to "destroy Linux." We're out to create our own community, a community around Solaris.

Next paragraph. OK, here's where we get to reading the news. If you bothered to read any press last week, you would have seen that we have changed our JDS/Linux strategy. Although we got a lot of kudos on our JDS/Linux distribution, a lot of people didn't like that it was based only on SUSE. We also wanted to get into more developing countries, and that means localizing it in markets SUSE isn't present in. In short, what you'll see very soon is JDS on other Linux distros.

And if you can't wait for that, JDS is now open source. You can create your own JDS based on your own distro, either Linux-based or OpenSolaris-based. Knock yourself out!

So you see, we're not throwing it away, we're expanding it! You'll also see us keeping things more up to date as well. If you have any questions, complaints, problems, whatever, feel free to let us know through the desktop discussion board on opensolaris.org.

Technorati Tags: JDS

A nice article on OpenSolaris in ComputerWorld. It's good to recognize the issue around compatibility between the various Linux distros, and the lack of such a problem with OpenSolaris distros. As the former Director of Linux at Sun, I know all too well the problems with different library versions between Red Hat and SUSE and Ubuntu and .... It drives the ISVs and customers nuts.

One thing I think I will nit pick on is the perception that Solaris is "old". Certainly the brand has been around a while, and I'll even concede that there are parts of Solaris that have been there forever (do we really ever need to rewrite "cat"?), but let's not think that Solaris is this giant monolithic piece of code we're just patching up with band-aid after band-aid. We re-write sections of Solaris all the time. Consider FireEngine, the re-write of the network stack. Solaris 10 network performance is smoking, but it took some major changes to do that. There are many, many more examples.

Solaris is an evolving piece of code. Its stability is due to the processes we have in place for how we develop code and how that code gets integrated, not because it's a lump of code that never changes. These processes are the same ones we have in place for OpenSolaris, and the reason why we'll stay compatible amongst the various distros.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris