On April 22, Sun held the Solaris Curricula Workshop in 大连 (DaLian: a beautiful port city north-eastern of China), ending the 6-city tour after 北京 (Beijing), 广州 (Guangzhou), 成都 (Chengdu), 西安 (Xi'an) and 上海 (Shanghai). 125 OS educators from 49 universities attended. Together with TsingHua, Peking, and JiaoTong Universities, 27 higher education institutes will add Solaris to their OS course this coming spring semester. When the semester ends, over 5000 college students would have studied the best operating system in the world, maybe building few new flavors with the source code from OpenSolaris.

From March to April, there have been 7 more University TechDays in other universities, with an average attendance of 300. Participants go to OpenTech.org.cn for source code and technological papers, and other materials.

Open technologies give China opportunities to catch up with the western world. Imagine few years from today, Lenovo will pre-install an OS that one of these students developed. This is real. China does not need to wait 20 years for the technology to mature. It can build from an existing foundation and add values of its own. With OpenSolaris, Chinese entrepreneurs do not need to worry about IPR and can proudly export their innovations to the world.

When that happens, I wish to be here to witness and to integrate those innovation into the operating system that Sun distributes. Everyone wins (well, except only one).

Tags: Open Source OpenSolaris Sun Microsystems Solaris China