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Saturday September 17, 2005

JavaChina: Solaris Track

JavaChina was a huge success. 8000 people registered and attended from 8 cities. The event keynote, by Scott McNealy, filled the whole stadium. In fact, few hundred registered attendants cannot get in for security considerations. I keynoted the Solaris technical track. As far as I can tell, all seats were occupied and about a dozen people were standing. The title was OpenSolaris is Perfect for China. I approached it mostly from the perfect match of 4 point: Innovation, brand, intellectual property right, and standards. OpenSolaris helps in every ways.

Of course you need innovations - the most critical ingredient of software. Unlike other technologies, software needs art-like creativity - that sparkle of genius followed by lots of hard work. But innovation alone will not suffice.
Brand is where loyalty attaches and value identified. Linux, as a brand, represent the OS innovations that are open and free. Distributions of Linux operating systems must find other values. RedHat, for example, stands for the services and quality certification of a particular flavor of Linux. It does not, and cannot, stand for technological innovation. Whoever wishes to innovate at Linux OS level must do it for free and without commercial recognition. Put it differently, with no brand that represents technical innovations. OpenSolaris gives you the option to create your own OS brand. No string attaches.
What happens when you infringe on someone's IPR (intellectual property reight)? You may lose everything. Companies get ruined. All the hard works flushed down the toilet. Dreams shattered. Hearts broken. You may have saved precious development time using open sourced products. But if you intend to make money (remember, GPL assumes you do not make money from your software innovations), you cannot risk possible infringements. What to do? Make sure the open-sourced technologies have a license that protects you. CDDL does.
Lastly, innovations without standards lead to anarchy. Standards allow independent innovations to compliment each others. They allow superior solutions to supplement, or replace, inferior ones without incurring switching pains on the users. When choosing standards, society must pay attention to the hidden strings usually attached. Commercial interests of technology owners should not over-shadow the welfare of the society. Otherwise, government may have played the role of tax collector, in terms of royalty payments, on behalf of the IP owners.

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris

posted by syw Sep 17 2005, 01:07:21 PM CST Permalink Comments [1]