Stratocaster

Tuesday June 14, 2005

MVM Exposed How cool is this? Want to get a glimpse of some really advanced software research? Source code for Sun Labs' Barcelona project (aka MVM) to make Java technology more scalable just got posted to the JDK Community research project on java.net. MVM stands for "Multi-tasking Virtual Machine", and this project aims to let multiple Java technology applications run in one VM, sharing resources, reducing start-up time, shrinking the memory footprint, all without any cross-application interference. Damn cool stuff - should work on VMs from cell-phone size to clusters of big servers.

But what is really cool is that if you're a developer, researcher, professor, or just a student of wizardly software engineering, you can get involved and contribute. This technology has gotten both press attention and plenty of interest from Java developers. Now that it is a full-fledged JDK research project, the community can look under the covers and see how it works, and help steer this technology's development by contributing ideas and code and talking with Sun Labs' researchers directly.

The Participation Age isn't just empty words - its projects like Barcelona on the JDK Community.
(2005-06-14 14:30:00.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Friday June 03, 2005

Learning to Share I'm very excited about Sun's new "Share" brand image. Why? Because finally Sun the corporation is talking to the world about what makes me want to come to work everyday. I've always felt that Sun is about community, participation, and sharing. It is so gratifying to see the company's image to the world be about the things that make Sun a fun place to work for me. The open and cooperative spirit I've seen so often with the teams and people I work with should help Sun be in the right spot to turn opportunities into good business as the industry moves into the Participation Age.

Sun has sometimes been accused of not playing nice with others. I've always thought this to be strange, because it conflicts so directly with my everyday experience. But a recent conversation I had with Jonathan Eunice at Illuminata crystallized for me one source of friction. Its not enough for Sun to make it easy to participate in Sun-sponsored projects like OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, Java, etc. Is Sun also willing to participate in others' projects?

Perhaps Sun hasn't done as good a job at highlighting its employees' participation in non-Sun efforts as in talking about how others can contribute to Sun's communities. In his blog, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady points to Sun's contributions to the accessibility toolkit component of the GNOME desktop project as one example of Sun engineers contributing their sweat equity. Another example: the Mozilla Foundation called out Sun's contribution to Firefox in the credits line of their New York Times advertisement (pdf), in appreciation of work done on the version 1.0 source base by Sun engineers. There are many other unsung examples... but they're unsung, and that is Jonathan Eunice's point.

Doing even more, and singing that song a bit louder might help change the perception that Sun should learn to share.
(2005-06-03 08:00:50.0) Permalink Comments [0]