Sun Tech Days, Milan

Jeff Jackson was today's keynote speaker at Sun Tech Days, Milan. Jeff is an interesting looking guy. Tall, lanky, rawboned. I always think of him as sort of a Clint Eastwood type, riding into a dust-blown western town on horseback, ready to take on any malevolence that comes his way (and, of course, for Eastwood, it always does). Jackson is also interesting because he's Sun's Senior Vice President of the Solaris Engineering Group, and Solaris is a primary focus at Sun. So coming into the session, I had expected the talk to be a straight sales pitch for Solaris -- though most of us know that Solaris is free -- so there's no selling here in terms of money. In fact, the talk did go over some important new features in Solaris. There were even some nice demos of the Dtrace facility, given by Solaris evangelist Peter Karlsson, and of Java FX Scripting, given by Java technology evangelist Inyoung Cho. But what Jackson really stressed in his talk is the importance to Sun and to the development community of sharing, interchange, and participation.

This sort of interaction is part and parcel of the open source approach, something in which Sun is heavily invested. Jackson noted that Sun is the largest contributor to the open source community. IBM is a distant second. Sun does this because in Jackson's words, "it's a way of getting your business problems solved." But to make this work, Jackson said the community needs to share it's insights and requirements. "You need to participate -- we'd like to hear what you'd like the technology to look like."

Jackson offered various instances where community participation or simply informally contributing ideas resulted in dramatic innovations.

• The Ant code building tool originated as a contribution from a Sun employee participating in the Apache community.
• J2EE now Java EE started as a rough idea in the minds of 3 people (including Jackson) who brought it with them when they joined Sun.
• Java Foundation Classes (JFC) started out as a sketch on a napkin that Mala Chandra gave to Jackson, who, in turn gave to James Gosling. Gosling coded it during a train trip, and gave the go ahead to do it.
• Java Sound, something that played a prominent role in the Inyoung Cho Java FX Scripting demo, started as a sound engine developed by Thomas Dolby. Jackson noted that this was "another Dolby," not the Dolby that founded the famous sound laboratory, Dolby Labs. Thomas Dolby, who as it happens was a neighbor of Jackson's, decided to contribute the sound engine to Sun.

Jackson challenged the audience to "join, contribute, talk to people, and participate." And as a start he noted that a gathering was scheduled this evening where the audience could talk to Sun folks as well as with Sun partners. Jackson encouraged the audience to share their ideas and ask questions.

As soon as I post this blog, I plan to go there.