Tuesday June 14, 2005

Blog Kick Off and OpenSolaris Change happens and communication happens, and all in real time. No more waiting for a magazine or a regularly scheduled email newsletter to arrive to find out what is happening in the industry or, in my case, what's happening with software at Sun.

The simple truth is that the fastest and easiest way to communicate a viewpoint directly to a customer, potential customer, partner or press, is through a blog. And so, here is my debut. As Executive Vice President of software at Sun, I'm involved in setting the agenda for what Sun is doing in software in this quickly evolving industry. Expect to see my opinions on the changes and opportunities I see on a regular basis.

And what better a day to kick off a blog than the official unveiling of OpenSolaris, a worldwide event initiated by all those with a common interest of using and improving one of the world's most advanced operating environments. The primary medium, blogs of course.

Prior to running all of software at Sun, my role was running the operating platforms group, home of the Solaris Operating System. I often get the question "when did we decide to open source Solaris," seen by many as the crown jewels of Sun's systems software? What was the tipping point to the decision? In fact, it was a steady evolution. There was talk as far back as the mid- to late nineties about open sourcing Solaris. About three years ago we committed to deliver Solaris 10 on the SPARC, Xeon and Opteron 64-bit platforms on the same day, with the same feature set, and, committed to open source it via an OSI-approved license. The majority of heavy lifting occurred more recently as we continued work at eliminating technical and legal encumbrances and preparing the code for broad availability  (including free availability of the corresponding optimized compilers and debuggers).  Sifting through literally millions of lines of Solaris code was extremely challenging, and time consuming. One of our key criteria all along was to offer a full, buildable source base, not just offer a few components. It took us longer than we wanted, but we're finally here with Phase I.

Developers and enterprises often want the open source code so they know they are not locked into a single proprietary technology. We think that for them, the primary "good" from open source comes from the freedom it gives them. "Free" is nice. "Freedom" from being locked in is even better. So we may not even see a lot of contribution to the code back from the large enterprises. That's OK. Developers, on the other hand, really are seeking a community of smart, committed people - with common interests and capabilities - with whom to interact. And they want free, unencumbered access to the best technology. OpenSolaris provides the opportunity to leverage a stunningly compelling technology, and make it even better. We expect an extraordinary group of developers to add value back to the common code, and build new businesses on top of it.

So there was no tipping point moment. Just an awareness of the trend line and the realization that open source is the methodology of this massively connected era. That, combined with Sun's genetic predisposition to open sourcing (everything from NFS to NetBeans to OpenOffice.org, etc.)  made this the obvious next step for Sun. And for those of you who thought there were only a couple of alternative operating systems for your "industry standard" x86 hardware, we give you another choice. Open. Free. So use it, enjoy it, tell me what you think of it - and what you think of our decision to open source it. Let's begin that conversation. As for Phase I: Mission accomplished. Now on to Phase II! Stay tuned.
Posted by johnnyl ( Jun 14 2005, 01:13:41 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [8]