What is "Greater China?" It is a sales territory that covers mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. But they are 3 very different entities (Hong Kong and Macau are usually lumped together) that deserve different business strategies. What they share is a common ethnical and historical ancestry and the same written language (well, kind of). Taiwan and mainland China also share the spoken language -- Mandarin. Regardless the governments' stance, the people in these regions try to work together. Most frequently out of social-economical needs and sometime for ethnical pride.

It is a beautiful day in Hong Kong. Blue sky, white clouds, a light breeze from the sea. If you are in the neighborhood around this time of the year, do stop by to stroll the street and people watch.

I keynoted at the 35th anniversary of JUCC (Joint Universities Computer Centre) Conference in Hong Kong on November 15th. Over 250 people attended from greater China universities. Practically all 1st tier universities from China participated. Among about 50 includes TsingHua, Peking, JiaoTong, FuDang, all 10 higher educational institutes in Hong Kong, and few from Taiwan and Macau.

Sun is one of the platinum sponsors. I presented right after the opening by Dr. Ng Nam, chair of JUCC. I talked about all the innovations in Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, and CDDL. There are few new points on the opportunities they bring to the acadamia, particular those in greater China.

OpenSource is great for academia

• It is so much better to study the theories with the actual implementation for reference. Students and teachers alike get much deeper understanding on how things are really done. The source code is a powerful inspiration for innovations that almost always come from a keen observation on an existing implementation (maybe I can just tweak that a bit and see what happens?)

• Think of how rich the curriculum can be. The professor knows every student can build his OS from a reliable source. He can point to the advanced scheduler and lecture at the scalability design. He can give a homework assignment for the students to design a new one or modify it for a special requirement. The computer architecture professor can ask the students to bring up a real OS from a classroom-CPU platform.

• It guarantees security. When asked if Solaris has any backdoors, I was alwyas stomped on the impossibility of proving that something that does not exist. Now that it is opensourced. Anyone can recompile his/her own version or to inspect the code and until completely satisfied.
  With the whole world watching, vulnerabilities will be discovered quickly and plugged. If a piece of software is not open, the hackers who discovered the vulnerabilties have a lot longer time to exploit them.

Sun gives you the most choices

Every layer of Sun's stack, from hardware platform, to OS, to middleware, to end-user environment are integrated and integratable. They are based on industry standard, such as Java and J2EE, so that customers can freely switch to whatever give them the optimal solution.

Of course, today Sun offers the best choices in almost every layer. Sun's hardware platforms are faster and cheaper than whoever. Our Solaris 10 is free for use. Our middleware is offered at a ridiculous low-price on a revolutional price model.

For Solaris 10, it is cheaper, faster, more secure. It runs your existing hardware and soon your Linux applications, sometime faster than on your Linux version. It is opensourced too.