Something to get excited about...
Tuesday Jun 14, 2005
So, OpenSolaris went live today. And it is exciting, at least for those of us within the industry and I daresay a few outside it. It's a massive piece of intellectual property that is being shared for what used to be known as the common good. Some people don't know how to read it, or what to read into it, or even whether to believe it exists. If it were nakedly self-interested, it would probably be applauded as a shrewd move by Sun. But it isn't, it is about SHARING the technology in Solaris. If you read Bryan Cantrill's piece on the Economics of Software (redux version here, heck, I know you've got other blogs to read), you may just start to feel, as I do, that the Open Source movement is evidence of true human progress, (as well as being a shrewd move).
Since the information revolution started, an enornmous amount has changed for many people in the world (and equally, it has left many, many, untouched). When I close my eyes and imagine the bright and distant future (why do we say "dim and distant"?), I see a world where operating systems are freely accessible for people in the way that mathematics or languages are today.
We should also consider that these intellectual tools will comes in many shapes and sizes, and that it won't always be the best (however you measure that) ones that are the most popular. Think about the English language. Spanish is a much more regular language, much easier to learn, to some ears it sounds more beautiful and I'm sure people feel cool when they speak it. They certainly seem cool. But English is evidently the global language at the moment and the reasons are obvious, and obviously socio-economic in nature, and they are not intrinsic to the mongrel language itself.
So, I am working on OpenSolaris now, and excited to do so. I hope that many people inside Sun, outside Sun, inside and outside the industry will feel the same.
What's your vision of the future of technology otherwise?
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