Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Happy New Year

Well the carols got washed out (pretty badly) on Christmas Eve. It's looking overcast for New Years, but hopefully all should be well.

Heading over to a neighbour's house to sample each other's home-brew and catch the Sydney fireworks on the box.

To those who read my blog (and those who don't) I wish you all the very best for the new year. Enjoy the festivities too!

Oh yes, the kids had a wonderful Christmas. New bikes for both of them and a trampoline (and many other smaller things). Lucy was overheard to open the front door and whisper "Thank-you Santa" while we were still in bed. She then went upstairs and "woke me up" saying "Dad, it's the best Christmas ever. What more could a parent want at Christmas?

Christmas dinner consisted of some fantastic Barbeque Ribs, courtesy of moi and a selection of various salady type stuff and more of the home brew.

Monday is a public holiday in Australia, so I'll be back on Tuesday.

Again, Happy New Year to you all

Posted at 05:01PM Dec 31, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Response to Linux versus Sun's Solaris: It's the community stupid

I only noticed this article today although it was posted during November.

First off I have to say that as someone at Sun who is (peripherally) involved in the open sourcing of Solaris, that I do not see this as a strictly Open Solaris vs Linux thing. There is room here for all comers and I believe that the more code out there in open source kernel space, the better for the industry as the whole. None of us has the monopoly on innovation and we can all learn from each other.

Frank sees us as having a number of problems to solve.

...ranging from limited hardware compatibility a mix reputation regarding open source to the below par service organization, before they can become successful again.

If you are talking about Solaris prior to Solaris 10, I would wholeheartedly agree with you about our lack of driver support. With the advent of 10, though, the picture changes. We are working actively with vendors and the community to get drivers for current hardware. I myself run Solaris 10 on my Dell Inspiron 8500. The installation went through without a hitch. The only drivers that I was missing were for the Broadcom ethernet and Wireless. I got the Broadcom ethernet driver from a membero of the Solaris community (thank you Muryama-san). Broadcom still has not (to my knowledge) shared their wireless specs with anyone. Many of the key Solaris developers internal to Sun do their major development work on their own notebooks. Believe me, there is incentive to get current hardware supported.

I would be interested to hear why you state that our service is below par. I am a member of that Service Organisation, and I have only ever received glowing reports from our customers.

Mixed reputation regarding Open source? Please explain. Sun is the second largest contributor to the open source movement (behind Berkely) and has been working in this area for more than twenty years!

He also makes the point that an awful lot of Linux people responded to the article and he did not see a single response from the Solaris community.

Well, that could be for any number of reasons. First off, The original article was a red rag to a bull for the Linux community. Of course it was going to get a lot of people being awfully defensive. Another that I can say for myself is that I quite simply did not see the article until I had a response to it pointed out to me today. You will note that I am responding.

I certainly will not argue that Linux has a large and active community. I would regard it as a mistake to say that Solaris has none. Indeed the last person to say that offended some very vocal members of that community.

I responded to Joshua Wulf's response to you in my blog here. But the main point I made is that I agree that community is critical.

We are open sourcing Solaris in response to the Solaris community. Many of whom are actively developing for Solaris. Our aim is to encourage this. We certainly agree that having a strong community is never to be underestimated.

Simply have a look at what happened when Sun elected to defer Solaris 9 for x86. The community effort was such that not only is Solaris on x86 hardware back on the agenda, it's at our fore-front!

You also make a statement about "Making Solaris 10 free and open source, compatible with the x86 platform". There are a few things that should be corrected here. First, there is the inferance (probably unintended) that we are only open sourcing Solaris for x86. Solaris is build from a single source tree for all platforms. We are open sourcing Solaris, not Solaris for a particular platform. Second, there is another inferance that we are newcomers to operating systems on x86 hardware. This is not true. I believe that we have been doing Solaris on x86 hardware since around Solaris 2.1.

I find myself constantly amazed at the vehemance with which many folk in the Linux community respond to any comment about Open Source Solaris. We believe we have a pretty good operating environment here. Is sharing it with the community such a bad thing? Hey maybe we can all learn something from each other?

Posted at 02:33PM Dec 31, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[3]

Response to Free Doesn't Refer Just to Price

Joshua Wulf wrote a well considered blog entry discussing the views of Frank Ottink (CEO of Yeald).

The article under discussion has had a huge amount of comment all over the place since it was first posted in November and Frank has written a subsequent article (which I may do a reply to shortly).

The thrust of the post is "there is more to Open Source, GPL and Free Software than simply not charging for it". Most specifically he makes the point about the community that is driving the software.

To put it simply Joshua, I agree with you. The community is critical.

Where a lot of the analysis falls down is in making the assumption that there is no community (which I argued in my response to Martin Fink).

While certainly not the size of the GNU/Linux community, there is a thriving Solaris community, some members of which take great offense at being told that they dont exist.

Part of the reason that we are doing teh open sourcing is that the Solaris community has been asking us for it. There are a lot of folks out there already doing development and actually open sourcing Solaris is an effort to help drive this further.

I'll go a bit further to say that as one of the folks involved in this project (peripherally), I don't see this as an Open Solaris vs Linux thing. There is room here for all comers and I believe that the more code out there in open source kernel space, the better for the industry as the whole. None of us has the monopoly on innovation and we can all learn from each other.

Posted at 02:03PM Dec 31, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Enterprise Unix Roundup: 2004, the Year of the Ferment

Michael Hall has written up his Enterprise Unix Roundup for 2004 at Serverwatch.

I've been reading prior articles from Michael, and it's nice to see that it looks like he is coming to the belief that we are not to be written off yet. In fact the title for the portion on Sun is "Sun: Not Dead, Maybe Even Renewing Itself".

He's also become far less skeptical about the Open Sourcing of Solaris, although there still appears to be the feeling that we are going to "... keep firm control over the OS". Being involved in the pilot and seeing the direction in which we are going convinces me otherwise, but I guess we'll just have to let the community and the press draw their own conclusions once the license is announced and the Open Sourcing formally launched.

I think that the final paragraph is worth quoting.

In the end, although Sun's two most positive actions this year were its push to stress the technical merits of Solaris (with an attendant promise to focus on its neglected Solaris x86), and its partnership with AMD to x86 hardware to market. The former means Unix on the whole will continue to move forward, and the latter represents good timing on Sun's part, as Intel's Itanium founders in the face of AMD's Opteron assault.

Posted at 08:56AM Dec 31, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[7]

Compliments of the Season to All

Well, it's Christmas Eve here in Sydney. We're about to head home. We're taking the kids out to Carols by Candlelight at The Entrance this evening. We've gone to this one for the last few years and it's always been an enjoyable experience.

Then it bundle them into bed (leaving out the lemonade and chocolate cake for Santa and the carrot for Rudolph) and the looks of wonder and joy tomorrow morning as they open their gifts.

We're doing Ribs on the Barbecue and I'll be opening a few bottles of the home brew (and bottling the next lot).

The weather forecast for today and tomorrow looks ominous...

IDN10031
FORECAST FOR NSW
Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
New South Wales
Issued at 11:42am on Friday the 24th of December 2004
For remainder of today and Saturday

WARNINGS:
Moderate flood warning for Namoi River at Goangra and downstream.
Minor rural flood warning for Lower Gwydir River Valley.
Minor to moderate flood warning for Barwon/Darling River upstream of Bourke.
Moderate to major flood warning for Darling River downstream of Bourke. 

NEW SOUTH WALES:
Very High Fire Danger for the Central West Slopes and Plains, Riverina, and
Lower Western until midnight Friday. 
Scattered showers and thunderstorms in the eastern half of the state today.
Scattered showers and thunderstorms in the northeast Saturday, clearing showers
in the southeast. Dry in the west.  Warm to hot northwest to northeast winds
ahead of south to southwest change moving through the southeast today reaching
central coast in the evening and Queensland border by tomorrow afternoon. 

This forecast is issued daily at 05.15, 1120 and 16.30.  For more information
visit the Bureau web site at http://www.bom.gov.au

I hope we don't get washed out tonight, and I certainly hope the kids get to play with their gifts outside tomorrow (and I'd really rather not be outside working the barbecue in the rain).

Anyway, Monday and Tuesday are public holidays in New South Wales, so I won't be back until Wednesday.

Merry Christmas to all.

Posted at 01:19PM Dec 24, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  | 

Solaris x86 discussion on OSnews

There is a pretty interesting discussion of the Techuser article (Sun Microsystems' x86 Strategy) at OSnews.

Many folk are picking up where Usman Latif has made good points, and where he has missed the point.

All in all, this thread promises to provide a good read.

Posted at 01:13PM Dec 24, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  | 

Linus, Open Solaris, Sound-Bites and the press

This is probably going to sound a bit strange coming from a Sun engineer and an Open Solaris Advocate, but I seriously think that Linus is being maligned here.

My reading of the article leads me to believe that the interviewer was looking for Linus to say something controversial in order to push the story. What could be better for a journo than a a Solaris vs Linux free for all?

Stephen Shankland does little for his credibility as a jounalist by taking him completely out of context with comments like

But the 34-year-old Finnish programmer isn't fazed by Solaris. In fact, he's downright dismissive, calling it a "joke."

What Linus actually said is quoted further down the article

What do you think about the x86 move and the new Solaris features?

Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86.

This is a much more considered statement. There are obviously folks out that that agree and disagree strongly on this; but as a Linux user from pre 0.99, I can certainly say that Linux was there at one time as well. Meanwhile Sun is pulling out all stops to get current hardware certified and working.

It's also reasonable that he is adopting a wait and see approach. All of the information about what we are doing with regards licensing etc is not yet in the public domain. I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to do much in the way of public comment as they either are not aware of the information or under Non-Disclosure.

Another sound bite that is getting quoted out of context all over the place is

When Sun releases Solaris as open-source software, will you take a peek?

Probably not.

The answer actually does not stop at that point. Linus goes on to say

... Not because of any animosity, but simply because I don't have the time or the interest. Linux has never been about "others," it's been about getting better than itself, so I don't really have any motivation to play around with Solaris. I'm sure that if it does something particularly well, people will be more than happy to tell me all about it.

Again, perfectly reasonable.

What we really have here is a press beatup trying to feed/create a free-for-all between Solaris and Linux Advocates. The truth is that there is room in this space for all players. While I was an SA before coming to Sun, I had been (and still am) a great fan of choosing the right Operating Envronment for the specific job that I'm interested in. At times this means that I've run things from DOS and various incarnations of windows through IRIX, RiscOS, SunOS, Solaris, VMS and, yes, even Linux.

I also happen to believe that Solaris 10 has some pretty amazing stuff in it. I've worked in Unix since the days of Version 7, with source code to the current day in Solaris. I quite like working in the Solaris codebase, I find it very easy to work with and very logical. I know there are folks out there who will shout me down for that, but just as they are entitled to their preferences, so am I.

In closing on this one, I think we all need to remember that Journalists are looking for a story that will get them read. Some have more integrity than others in chasing it. Taking sound-bites from this interview out of context has caused an amazing flame-fest on various mailing lists, newsgroups and boards. It's a shame really.

Posted at 08:32PM Dec 22, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Comments are re-enabled

Due to a nice bit of work within the Sun Blogging community, it's now a lot simpler for me to remove blog spam. As such, I've re-enabled comments. I'd be very interested in comments on Martin Fink and Jonathan Schwartz agree on something?

Sorry for having to turn them off over the weekend.

Posted at 07:47AM Dec 20, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

That's me for the week

The highlight being that Jacob and Lucy turned 6 this week.

Tomorrow we are giving them a party at chipmunks. They are also having the chipmunk visit the party. Should be fun.

Hopefully I may get to turn comments back on next week.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Posted at 07:46PM Dec 17, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  | 

Martin Fink and Jonathan Schwartz agree on something?

I don't have a lot of time to write on this as I'm heading home for the weekend, but I find it interesting that both Martin Fink and Jonathan Schwartz apear to hold very similar views on Intellectual Property and Patents.

Both above write-ups make for interesting reading.

I would really like to have seen discussion on this, but thanks to that idiot who is running a blog spamming robot, don't dare.

Posted at 07:37PM Dec 17, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Turning off comments for a while (sorry)

Thanks to the actions of a single comment spammer I regret that I have to turn off comments in my blog.

Yesterday and the day before I had to delete around 30-40 of the same comment each day. This morning I came in to discover 120 of them.

Someone blogged earlier about Jonathan's 11 words. The first two were Make Money. I can't contribute to that while having to work through this many deletions each day.

The fokks here are fast-tracking the rollout of roller 1.0 which has better anti-spam capabilities and hopefully it should be up in the next few days. Once that happens, I'll re-enable them.

Posted at 07:53AM Dec 17, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Letter from School

Last week, the kids brought home a letter addressed to the parents of Jacob and Lucy Hargreaves.

Full of apprehension, we opened it and discovered that there was to be a presentation night for the school on Tuesday night and both Jacob and Lucy were to receive awards.

It turns out that only five kids in each class received awards.

Lucy is always drawing and colouring in, so I guess it was no real surprise to see her receive the award for Arts and Crafts.

The surprise was that my little boy, who always says "I can't remember" when I ask him what he did at school today, got the prize for mathematics. Funnily enough, on the way in to the presentation (before I knew what they were getting), he suddenly pipes up with

"Daddy, did you know that nine plus five plus four is eighteen?"

Quickly adding them up myself (tick, tick, tick), "That's right Jake! Well done!" :)

Isn't it wonderful how your kids can surprise you?

Posted at 09:59AM Dec 15, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  |  Comments[1]

Martin is considering a reply

Martin Fink has made a reply to my comments on his earlier comments on Solaris 10 (Page down this blog for the links, I'm not going to reproduce them in this entry). I look forward to your response. Thank you for committing to at least considering one. In a way it's a shame that we can't get into a longer discussion over this as I'm sure it could get interesting, but we'll see where your reply leads us. :-)

Sorry I didn't notice it earlier. The link I had bookmarked to your blog only took me to November. I hadn't noticed that you had done up some entries for December. Maybe things will be a bit clearer when you move over to the new site.

For the benefit of folks reading Martin's blog, when you go to a page, if you "mouse-over" the Blogs title in the left column, it will popup a number of months (currently November and December). From there you can select the latest.

I also look forward to reading on the other topics you have alluded to...

• comments on the CDDL
• patents and IP

Hope you had a productive trip to Korea and SoftExpo.

Posted at 07:44PM Dec 10, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[1]