I decided to walk the morning of May 6th. On my way to Moscone center I noticed cliques of people carrying the same designed backpack. Tricles became streams; streams merged into torrent rivers. I arrived at 8:15 and decided to browse the bookstore to kill minutes before the general session. When I was done, at 8:25, guards formed a line preventing more people from tailing the queue. They don't want a mob scene when the doors open. The crowd, I was part of them, waited for nearly 20 minutes before it was "safe" to proceed.

I was a resident in San Francisco bayarea for many years but rarely stay in the city. I arrived Sunday night and stayed in a hotel near Union Square, a lovely area full of shopping, restaurants, and activities. When I heard the bell, Tony Bennett's song came to me.

I gasped and ran up to John Gage to shake his hand when he had a break. He was helping James Gosling with their t-shirt launcher. He co-hosted JavaOne's opening session, talked about sensors, instruments, network, and, of course, his favorite subject: Earth. I saw lovely Rita and Fiona who came to help out the OpenSolaris launch. Everywhere are hugs of old friends: Diane and her staff, Solaris people, etc. Whichever Stephen Hahn's disease that made him wear a tie seemed to have infected David Comay too. Oh well...

Ian Murdock opened CommunityOne with eye-catching artistic slides. Rich Green, Jim Hughes, and Jeff Bonwick decisively upstaged him destroying harddisks with sledge hammer, anvil, and power drill, on the stage. The robustness of ZFS kept the system and application running while the boys were having a great time.

Jetlag overpowered and kept me from the OpenSolaris release party. Good thing that Fiona took pictures of everyone having a great time.

It was a pleasant surprise to bump into Lin Lee, Jonathan's newest staff member and an old friend in China. We sneaked out to Yerba Buena park for a cup of tea. As I sipped, I recognized a joke of globalization. I flew 7000 miles to have Chinese tea in San Francisco; my favorite afternoon drink in Beijing is a cup of Java. Lin ordered Lapsang Souchong, a Chinese tea that none of us heard of before. Google showed it to be "正山小种" or "星村小种". This makes the whole tea-drinking even more laughable: the dark tea came from my ancestor's hometown. My father grew up in 星村 (XingCun) and may have named me with it.

JavaOne was even more entertaining. Ian Freed from Amazon demonstrated Kindle, an electronic book the size of a thin paperback. After a few more guests, Jonathan unveiled the special guest Neil Young, the venerable rock singer. Neil Young came on stage with a cap and wrap-around sunglasses. His signature side-burns are all grey already. Instead of singing, he introduced his archive that includes everything about his music since 1963. At the end, he showed a LincVolt vehicle that records all energy going in and out of the old Lincoln when it tours the country. The visual of an aged Neil Young, a pony-tailed Jonathan, and a sleek black-t-shirted Rich Green on stage is just so special and memorable. I was hoping for a song, but got only several needle drops from Neil Young's archive.

Questions from netizens lingered on after the IT168 interview, “How Sun, pioneer of open source, makes money?” I shall always remember Solaris 10. It took almost 4 years and thousands of talented engineer. How do we justify the investment if we open source? I decided to make this the topic for my talk at China's Partner CTO Summit, featuring distinguished guests such as Hal Stern and Jim Baty.

The era of software licensing is over. Now, participation defines community; communities become marketplace; marketplace generates revenue and leads to profit. How do you get people to participate at the first place? You set your software free. Freedom feeds the hunger of creativity and attracts participation.

Communities, however, must avoid anarchy that hampers profitability. For software, this means the necessity of licenses. Free software combined with proper licensing terms creates healthy participation and leads, eventually, to profitability.

This path shapes like a funnel. The mouth needs to be huge for as many and large communities as possible. Over the other end, a much smaller subset of them generate enough revenue. It is always good to have the mouth of the funnel bigger. It is also foolish to expect a high conversion rate, even worse to manipulate the licenses to increase the conversion rate. Never weaken freedom.

The conversion is not automatic. The participants enjoy the software and require a good reason and an easy mechanism to pay for it, directly or indirectly. Google is paid for by advertisements. MySQL collection subscription and service fees. ITune is part of iPod and a channel for Apple's online music business.

Sun first cultivated communities that are interested in our technologies and products. Then we attract developers to create solutions based on those technologies and products. Monetization then starts: entrepreneurs launch businesses with our technologies; hardware products enjoy a bigger market; enterprises still pay licensing fees for various reasons; communities members pay for subscription, support, and services; enthusiasm generates demands for training and consulting services.

OpenSourcing got Sun noticed and media covered. It opens doors previous shut tight. In this complex world of technologies, many larger companies will pay dearly for the what Sun received from open sourcing our software. Hack, I even heard someone saying Microsoft is now open-sourced. Shows how envious they are.

Yes, you will read bad stories from the media. You are probably worrying about the company and its future. That's a good thing that you worry. You may be even worrying about yourself. That's natural.

Yes, we lost money and planned to reduce OPEX (that means we may layoff people) for about 100 to 150 millions dollars. That's lots of reduction and it sounds scary.

Let me suggest a way to handle this news.

Sun Microsystems is in the "knowledge industry." You are very likely a "knowledge professional." This means you compete in this world with what you know. The company competes with the management of its employees' knowledges.

Ask yourself, "Am I learning more and applying what I have learned?" Also ask yourself, "Can I learn faster and more effectively?" (The 2nd answer is always yes. Think of coaching, environment, project scope, etc.)

You should feel the comfort that whatever you have learned is always yours. You should feel the pressure that the whole world is trying to out-learn you. You should compel yourself to out-learn them.

And that will make you a great employee, make the company stronger, and give you the security and a good career too.

Fog completely shrouded ShangHai on the 2nd day. The hotel window, instead of framing the spectacular river-side cityscape, showed nothing: only lights without sources. I thought, "How long will the taxi line at the lobby?"

For 11 consecutive years, China's Ministry of Education and Sun Microsystems jointly held the conference for China higher education community.

The 1st day's morning has 4 Sun speakers, and several distinguished guests from China government. Jason Tong is the MC. Chris Lin, Sun China GM, welcome all attendants. Crawford Beveridge, Sun's EVP, talked about government's role in education and innovation. He started with a history of innovation and showed the trend of urbanization. He showed the list of largest cities in the world: both Beijing and ShangHai are on the list. Joe Hartley, VP of Global Government, Education & Healthcare, talked about personal roles in communities. His speech motivates people to become leaders, activists, or influencers in their communities. It earned a long applause from the audience.

Yours truly shamelessly plagiarized Greg Papadopoulos's Cloud Computing presentation. Greg observed the big trends in education and IT technologies are conveniently, and coincidentally, amplifying each others. I needed to shorten the material for the time. Hopefully, I still delivered the essences of his presentation. Simon See, Architect on HPC, ended the conference with a talk about the trend in high performance computing (HPC).

In addition to keynotes, there were several tracks of interactive sections and about a dozen or of exhibitions on various technologies and products. Overall, the conference was well-attended with IT professionals and professors from universities around the country. This is the 3rd time I participated this event. I am definitely coming next year too.

IDF this year was next to the lovely Bund of ShangHai, overlooked by the strangely shaped Oriental Pearl Tower. This is my 3rd time in two years attending IDFs. Intel packed their usual power executives and attracted estimated more than 5,000 attendants. At 9am, long line snaked out to the street waiting to enter. Hordes of brightly jacketed youngsters cradling a pen-laptop to search people's registration codes when they are still in the line. I was one of them, she tried my name and then my email address. Finally, she located my code and directed me to a counter to retrieve my badge.

I herded myself to the meeting hall and sat down right before Pat Gelsinger's keynote. After the fanfare, he showed up on a wide screen! I was in the simul-cast room. The instinct of getting up quickly subdued. The screen did a good job; Pat spoke, polished, well-rehearsed, and obviously from a stage at a much larger hall upstair. I learned my lesson and attended the great hall for Renee James's keynote the 2nd day.

The evening reception was a packed house — stand-up cocktail style. Exuberant Intel employees and invitation-only guests celebrated another successful IDF. A small stage featured "live statues" of motionless pretty women. A commontion sparked when 3 dancers, to the tune of New York, New York, dragged Intel senior executives on stage. They were good sports, but bad dancers. I re-acquainted myself with several of them and made several new friends too.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor at IDF. Amiram Hayardeny attracted a standing-room only attendance with a topic of "Let Sun Shines on your Intel Platform." We exhibited various Software and Hardware technologies. People checked us out in a steady flow; everyone left with a nice stylish t-shirt too. All registered attendants also get a OpenSolaris CD in their bag.

ShangHai is a nice break from Beijing that is intensively focused on the Olympic. I took the opportunity to meet several customers and partners. I will also take a long detour back home via YangZhou, mixing business and pleasure together. That will be another blog.

I was horrified. The room felt damp and warm. My finger slid through a fine coat of dust settled on a flat surface. What's going on here? It is supposed to be meat-locker cold and air-tight. This is a disaster for a high-density data-center, also known as the system lab.

We built this lab only 4 years ago, with extra air-condition units. It is still state-of-the-art: carefully spaced racks, inert-air fire distinguishing, sound-absorbing wall-covering, swipe-card access control, power management, the works. We are Sun. We knew how to do data-centers.

We did not. We under-estimated the growth curve, electricity consumption, and cooling demand. The lab over-heated near the end of last year and we had an "oh sh*t" moment. The options are all ugly: turn off some machines and lose the services they provide, move them to a different lab and suffer disruption, or add more cooling capacity and deal with the hell of funding request. Then, someone came up with a brilliant and stupid idea: open the windows. It is brilliant that outside Beijing air was below freezing; it provided effective and economic cooling. It is so, so stupid that it defeated inert air fire control and shortened the equipment life-span by exposing them with unfiltered air. It also stops working when spring arrives.

Nevertheless, we had time to plan for a move. As this drama unfolds, Sun's eco messages repeated louder than thunders. We experienced the pain of being cooling-capacity constrained. Had we moved to cool-thread technologies earlier, we would have averted the pain.

A testimony for our own gospel? Sigh..

Seldom, we longed so much for the new guy to arrive. And rarely, the arrived fits so well.

Welcome Chris Lin, Sun's new President for Greater China. We started recruiting since summer. Last Friday, February 22nd, he came onboard officially. Monday, virtually the 2nd day at work, he visited our engineering center. Sun's press release described his background.

Yes, he held senior positions in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the USA. He speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and English fluently (plus some native Taiwanese). Chris was born in the GuangDong (Canton) Province (广东，潮安) in the mid-60s, moved to Hong Kong after elementary school, and 12 more times in his life. He has become a Beijing resident. His family, wife and 2 kids, will join him when the school year starts.

A whirl-wind of activities swept him up immediately. He has visited all three regions of Greater China and will fly to India the next morning. His visit to ERI started with a nice lunch over which I found him personable, straight-forward, energetic, and a bit nerdy quite enthusiastic on technologies.

He took off the jacket and loosened the tie when he entered the room. After a brief introduction, a dialogue lasted over an hour with engineering leadership. We were curious on his positions on open-source, China's market, Sun's future in this country, etc. He answered readily. We also touched on some softer parts of him. (His proud accomplishment of the past 7 years was his family. His biggest anxiety of this job is not being able to spend enough time with them. He does not believe doing business in China is significantly different from elsewhere.)

This appears to be the beginning of a nice relationship.

Last spring, I asked Sun's China engineering center to figure out how to self-govern an activity. It has been an interesting process to observe. But first some background.

In China, companies of reasonable size must provide funds for "union activities." By law, it is a percentage of the payroll budget. Sun's employees here are not interested in forming unions. The money, however, is in spend-it-or-lose-it category. The creative Sun employees then formed SunClubs. They are similar to school clubs: sports, hobbies, travels, or any social activities for a reasonable large group of people to engage regularly. The spirit of the laws is to be independent from company management. The governance of these clubs, therefore, is outside of the normal management structure.

Self-governance: a concept quite new to many people here at Sun China Engineering, let alone well-practiced. Is this possible? I thought I will place my faith on people and give it a try.

First, I called for volunteers to work on this. About a dozen people showed up and I gave them the task: to propose the mechanism of governing SunClubs, but not to do it themselves. They are to create the machine for others to run. There will be no managerial presence, let alone interference, on this process. I held my breath, bit my lips, and sat on my hands. Watching my kids growing up was faster.

9 months later. They came up with a by-laws. It has chapters on the structure of a council, an administrative team, roles and responsibilities, check and balance, transparency and accountability, and a re-election process. They showed me the by-laws and asked me to hold the 1st election for council members. I was too glad to oblige.

14 members were voted into the council via general election, as stipulated by the by-laws. I called for their 1st meeting and give them the task: represent their constituents, operate according to the by-laws, including the modification of it if so desired.

Here we have a young democratic governing body in the room. They did not know that they will be practicing a skill that will affect the rest of their lives and help change the world along the way. The only way for it to work is for me not to meddle. I left the room, breath held, lips bitten, and hands wrung behind my back.

Walking out of my last meeting of this trip from MPK18. This cloistered pathway leading to MPK10 is such a sight. Blue sky, afternoon sun, 60 degree weather. Sigh... San Francisco bayarea, what a livable place.

For English, scroll down.
日本翻訳に松倉綾子さんに感謝しなさい。

オフィスへ辿り着くのは、エキサイティングな一日の始まりでした。 私は、9:30から始まるミーティングのために、新宿の京王プラザホテルを8時に出発しました。 まず最初に、地下鉄の都庁前駅を見付けました。 そこから、青山一丁目まで 210円支払いました。約20分かかりました。 私は、乗り継ぎの半蔵門線を探し回りました。 いくつか階段を昇りましたが、自動改札機が私を妨げました。私の切符は、青山一丁目までの物でそれ以上先へは行けなかったのです。 先に進む為には、私は更に多く払わなければなりません。角にいくつかの自動券売機がありました。 更に80円支払った後、私は乗り継ぎの電車に乗るためにプラットフォームで待っていました。電車は、渋谷で私が待っていたホームとは違う場所に到着しました。 東急田園都市線で用賀まで行きました。用賀は急行の止まらない小さな駅です。 駅を出ると、SBSタワーの地下入り口が右側にありました。（まだ開いていませんでしたが。） 私は 8:50 に、21F に行くエレベーターを見つけました。 オフィスまでの旅は、ホテルから駅までの 20メーターを除いてすべて、雨風を避けることが出来るものでした。 とてもクールです！

私の社員証はドアを開けることが出来ませんでしたが、幸いにもある方が到着し、私をオフィス内へ入れてくれました。

ここのサンオフィスの入り口では、まだ古いスタイルのバッジ式を使用しています。私がトイレに行くのに誰の邪魔もせずに済むよう、テンポラリーカードが即座に用意されました。

オフィスからの景色は反射鏡のようです。 摩天楼都市の全景だけでなく、富士山もはっきり見えます。

社員は皆、同じサイズの、低いしきり付きの小さなブースにいます。 会議室は窓がなく、閉所恐怖症を思い起こします。 休憩室には、素晴らしいコーヒーの自動販売機（ホットコーヒーは無料）があります。 そこには、本物のスターバックスが飲めるコーヒーメーカーもあります。 すべてのブースには、ヘルメットと吊り縄式のバッグがあります。 30F 以上のビルが地震で崩れた際、頭を保護するのに重要となるのでしょう。

9:30 に始まったミーティングは、6:30までノンストップでした。 私は、サン東京オフィスと日本のビジネスを垣間見ました。 大曽根　明さん、ジム　グリサンズィオさん、末次　朝彦さんは、ここの上位職の方にあたります。かわいらしい松倉　綾子さんは、すべてのアレンジと地下鉄の情報等をくれました。

末次さんは、日本のセールスのトップの方です。 彼と大曽根さんは、日本サンの成功を収める上で密接なパートナーの関係です。 ジムさん（熱心なブロガー）は、日本に住んで３年が経ちます。彼は、サンのコミュニティーを世界、特にAPAC に広げ、築き上げる助けとなる人です。

更に私は、原口　章司さん、奥津　正義さん、仁村　一利さん、岩渕　文彦さん、塩田　智則さん達ともお話をしました。 彼等は、日本における素晴らしい洞察、日本のサン及び日本サンのエンジニアの役割を教えてくれました。 私達は、陽気な会話をしました。 そして私は、日本に病みつきになったことに気が付きました！

英語の個人的な印象のためにここに行きなさい。

Getting to the office was an exciting start of the day. I left the hotel, Keio Plaza (京王) in Shinjuku (新宿), at 8am for the 9:30am meeting start. First, I found the Tocho-Mae (都庁前) subway station. From there, I paid ¥210 for the Aoyama-Ichomei (青山一丁目) destination. That took about 20 minutes. I searched for the the Hanzomen line (藏前門線) transfer and found it several flights upstair. Several kiosks around the corner accepted ¥80. Soon, I was on the platform for the right train. At Shinbuya (涉谷) station I boarded Tokyu-Detentoshi (東急田園都市線) line to Yoga (用賀), a small station that express trains do not stop. SBS building's basement is right outside the Yogo station. I found the elevator and reached 21st floor at 8:50am. Except for the 20 meters or so from the hotel to the station, the entire trip was heated and shielded from the elements. Very cool.

My badge did not open the door. Fortunately, someone arrived to let me in. Sun's office here still uses the old-style badge for entrance. I was promptly issued a temporary card so that I can go to the bathroom without bothering anyone.

The view from the office is specular. Not only there is a panaroma view of the city sky-scrapers, there is also Fuji Mountain in clear view. Everyone is in a same-sized smallish cubicle with short partition. The conference rooms are windowless and closet-phobia indusive. The breakroom displays an impressive coffee vending machine (free hot coffee). There is also a collection can for real Starbucks brew. Every cubicles has a hard-hat in a sling bag. Guess it is important to protect your head when a 30+ story building collapses in a earthquake.

9:30 begans the non-stop meetings until 6:30pm. I got my glimpse of Sun's Tokyo office and Japan business. Akira Ohsone, Jim Grizansio, and Tomohiki Suetsugu are among the senior people here. Lovely Ayako Matsukura arranged everything and gave me the subway station.

Seutsugu-san is the head of Japan sales. He and Akira are close partners on Sun's success in Japan. Jim, an avid blogger, has lived in Japan for about 3 years now. He is instrumental in reaching out and building up Sun's communities, globally and particularly in APAC. In addition, I also talked to Shoji Haraguchi, Masayoshi Okutsu, Kazutoshi Nimura, Fumihiko Iwabuchi, and Tomonori Shioda. They gave me wonderful insights on Japan, Sun in Japan, and Sun's engineering roles in Japan. We had lively conversations and I found Japan addictive.

Click here for a more personal impression.

I was working on another blog when the announcement came. OMG, Sun is buying MySQL (I pronounce it as "my see-qual.") What came to my mind was actually a conversation with Simon Phipps a few months ago, when he talked about the business of OpenSource.

When mentioning the OpenSource community, people think of Sandra Bullock in the movie "The Net." She played the socially challenged nerd, Angela Bennett, that never leave the cluttered and dark room full of computers. Her only connections to the world are the computer network and a phone. That impression is really very far from the majority of the community members.

Most of them work for a normal IT company just like you and me. Their company pays them to OpenSource projects. It also provide computer equipment, travel money, and sponsorship to the events or marketing activities. The OpenSource community will not exist without the resources and support of corporations.

This seems odd since the iconic founder of OpenSource, Richard Stallman, has always insisted on Free Software. Although he interepreted free as in freedom, not zero in price. It is still hard for people to link OpenSource software with company revenue directly. It is not intuitive.

OpenSource software means big business and serious money. They are simply different business model than the traditional licensing fees for right to use. I believe the trend is irreversible and will eventually encompass the entire industry. The leading edge of this business model revolution are those so-called Web2.0 companies. Impressive asa they are, they are the leading edge and not the entire wave. The whole thing is many magnitudes of order larger.

This is a long essay to convey my excitement on Sun's MySQL acquistion. MySQL is the engine of this Web2.0 industry and, with Sun's resources and strategy, to become the same of the whole software industry. That will be big business and serious money for Sun.

I gave a talk to a group of relatively senior engineer on their career paths. Some of them found it interesting and encouraged me to blog about it. I was easy to convince.

Labor market essentially exchanges personal productivity with compensation. You contribute to the company's objectives; the company pays you back. Your pay is roughly commensurate with your relevant skill level. For salary workers, this market is inefficient: companies usually adjust your compensation once a year and you do not look for new jobs on a whim.

The black curve and the green stair-case lines show the relationship between the value of skills and actual compensation. Your earned pay reflects the improvements of your skills. Companies do this in a zig-zag way: sometime over-paying and sometime under. The gap between these two lines cannot be too wide for too long. Either you will find a new job that pays your market rate, or the company will fire you for not giving your money's worth.

Once in a while, opportunity knocks and you change job, usually for better pay. You will find yourself in the red square area. Three possibilities explain your newly elevated wealth status. You may have recently acquired some skills, or have found a market for those you already had, but not appreciated well enough. In this case, you would have jumped from the black curve to the blue one and started climbing the new light-blue ladder.

Or, sadly, you may have simply got the raise that would have come just few months later from the old job: same curve, same ladder. In this case, you are being "golden hand-cuff'ed." You cannot leave until your skills have caught up with your pay. While you are so hand-cuff'ed, you lose the option to jump to the blue curve.

Ask first, when you are thinking of a new job, if you will be learning new skills. Don't ask if it pays better. You compensation will keep up with your skills, sooner or later. If you are not learning new skills, then you are simply being harvested.

Computer server makers that do not carry Solaris please name yourselves.

Wow! http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-11/sunflash.20071114.3.xml

IT 168, a Chinese new media interviewed yours truly. I guess it is my and their best interest to increase hit rates.

So, please click http://focus.it168.com/200711/11/index.htm to view.

Late 2005, I attended OSS Global Emerging Technology Executive Summit in Taipei. I presented that Sun's Solaris, newly open-sourced then, will be a perfect foundation for an economy that has a large OEM/ODM element. Two years later, I spoke at ICOS 2007 (International Conference on Open Source), again organized by III (Institute for Information Industry).

This time, Sun has thrived much more. Not only Solaris, Java and SPARC are also open-sourced. And ODF (Open Document Format) is now an ISO standard. Sun is now iconic in the open-source community, defining new territories and enabling possibilities. I felt the buzz in the audience. First time in their memory, a complete stack CPU, OS, development environment, and productivity tools for a wide range of solutions are available at their fingertips. Add own innovations, stir with good business senses, sprinkle finance to personal taste, no need for wheel re-invention, and a business will flourish. This is exciting.

We talked about an embedded system choosing SPARC for the processor. We talked about collaborative programs with universities on system design courses. We talked about possible new business surrounding this new eco-system. We were all excited.

The afternoon panel was on ODF. The audience, a roomful, had no mercy with the government. "Of course we will adopt ODF," responded one official. "We just need to manage the transition." The audience was not patient with the pace. I was grinning wide, but trying hard not to show.