Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Forbes follow up article on Open Sourcing Solaris

I just read an interesting article in Fortune where Jonathon Schwartz has responded to David Kirkpatrick on the Open sourcing of Solaris. The article is titled Why Open Source Doesn't Always Mean Free and Jonathon makes some interesting points and appears to have brought David around to thinking that this may actually be a good idea.

A couple of particularly interesting paragraphs were

What Schwartz's remarks underscore, and what I admittedly hadn't fully digested until now, is that open source means something quite different once it becomes a critical part of the enterprise infrastructure. Companies will pay a lot to ensure that their backbone systems are properly cared for, regardless of the development model under which the software was created. Nothing shows this more than the success of Red Hat. Its revenues for the fiscal year ended in February rose 39% to $126 million. And while it lost money the previous year, it made $14 million this time. And growth is accelerating. In the most recent quarter, ended in May, revenues grew 53%. More important, CEO Matthew Szulik has made a deft transition to a subscription and support model. Red Hat's enterprise subscription revenues are more than doubling annually. Since the renewal rates of these subscriptions exceed 85%, this is a great annuity. No wonder Sun wants a piece. In the past year Red Hat's stock has roughly tripled, and its market cap stands at $3.7 billion. Not bad for a company whose product is supposedly free. (Sun's market cap stands at $14 billion, and its stock is about 20% lower than a year ago.) Perhaps Red Hat will want to respond to Schwartz in a future column.

Posted at 08:51PM Jun 26, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  | 

Open Sourcing Solaris, where to discuss?

I just spent some time reading through some of the Comments to Andy Tucker's blog article Bigadmin forum similar to the one created for Dtrace or Zones.

Keep up the discussion folks, it's all good stuff and I look forward to seeing what is going to happen in the not too distant future.

Posted at 07:30PM Jun 26, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Got the car back!

With very little in the way of drame I got the car back yesterday (Friday) morning, gearstick now intact.

As the workshop who did the work was next door to my kid's school, I simply jumped on the school bus with them (the only adult apart from the driver), had the obvious upset of one child as I could only sit next to one of them (Jake got me this time, next time Lucy gets me) and wne to scholl with them.

Grand total spent getting it fixed was AUS$80, broken down into $60 labour and $20 for the gas and welding rod. I'm pretty happy with that.

Posted at 06:58PM Jun 26, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Working the weekend

Well this weekend I get to cover the VOSJEC pager from the office during APAC hours.

A nice quiet day, I actually managed to catch up on a few of my own calls, including some more time on backporting some ufs fixes for Solaris 8. Got the first lot of testing finished on SPARC. I've still got to run the test suite on x86 and the full load test on both. Hopefully I can get this to be ready for code inspection within a few days.

I may also get onto some testing on another call involving power management on an f280r with an xvr100 video card and Solaris 9. I've got a similar box built up in the local lab; we just have to get the thing replicating the problem. Once I've got it replicated I can look at setting some kernel breakpoints and watchpoints with kadb. Unfortunately, booting with kadb disables power management if there is a graphical console on the machine, so I've had to find a way to force it back on. It looks like I can do this with

ok boot kadb -d
...
kadb: <return>
kadb[0]: pm_cfb_override/W1
pm_cfb_override          0x0        =         0x1
kadb[0]: :c
SunOS Release 5.9 Version Generic_112233-12 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2003 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Jun 26 18:43:07 f280r-d Use is subject to license terms.
...
WARNING:Kernel debugger present: see kadb(1M) for interaction with power management.
...

Posted at 06:42PM Jun 26, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |