Today 20 people involved with OpenSolaris were honored with an internal award: the Software People's Choice Award. As the name implies, this is an award for people working in the Software organization at Sun, and anyone can nominate individuals and teams. Four people/teams are given the award each quarter, so I really do feel honored to be on a team that won. It isn't the nobel prize, but...

I do have some mixed feelings about the team being recognized with this award.

These 20 members of the team worked extremely hard, and (I think) should be singled out, but we aren't the only people who worked hard to make the launch happen. Many engineers sacrificed several evenings, weekends and other project work to help us get ready to release. Without them we wouldn't have gotten to opening day, had the blog launch or as vibrant a community.

So many people deserve credit for making OpenSolaris a reality, and it is difficult to draw the line in the right place: rewarding the extraordinary effort of the "core" team while acknowleging the valuable contributions of so many other people who helped make OpenSolaris viable. I suppose awards are just inherently exclusive, but my hope is that this one won't have an impact on the overall teamwork I admire so much on this project.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of the people inside and outside of Sun who helped get OpenSolaris off the ground and continue to make it successful, and I know the rest of the team feels the same way.