Saturday June 26, 2004

Comments and more

Thanks for all the comments. We're working on fixing the formatting issue - apparently we can enable "autoformat", which converts line feeds to HTML line breaks, but it needs to be set site-wide. If you have long comments, you can always send them by email to first.last@sun.com (replacing "first" and "last" with my name, obviously). Be sure to include whether I can post your comments or should keep them private, and whether I should use your name if I post them.

Alan Hargreaves suggests creating a BigAdmin forum for open source discussions, rather than using blogs. I think the general idea of a discussion forum is a good one, but BigAdmin doesn't really seem like the right place; it's more for technical discussions about specific technologies. In any case, lacking a good alternative, I'd like to use this blog as a medium for communicating (both ways) outside of "official" channels. Obviously, when the open source project goes live (perhaps earlier) we'll have discussion forums, mailing lists, etc.. (IRC, anyone?)

Alan also points out an article about open source Solaris in Fortune, discussing a letter the author received from Jonathan Schwartz. The text of the letter is included, and may be of interest to those wondering why we think this is a good idea for Sun, as opposed to the community.

Friday June 18, 2004

On opening up Solaris

One of the projects I've been working on lately is figuring out how we're going to make the Solaris code available as open source, and create an open development model around it allowing (and encouraging) contributors from outside the company. Some of you may have heard that Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's COO) recently announced that we're going to be doing this. We've actually been working on it for quite a while, but the public announcement has certainly increased the pressure (both internal and external).

There's been a lot of speculation about why we're doing this, whether we're out to "attack" Linux or whatever. From where I sit, this isn't at all what we're trying to do. We've been working on Solaris for a number of years, and are proud of what we've accomplished. We'd like to make it easier for more people to use it, and to help us improve it. We see open source as a way to enable that. If you prefer Linux, that's fine; I'm a firm believer in diversity and choice. In the end, diversity helps drive innovation, which helps the end user (and keeps me employed).

As you might expect, working on this involves lots of time spent meeting with lawyers about licenses and such. Obviously we have to worry about the legal stuff, but I'm also interested in hearing from other people outside the company about what you think we should do. Clearly we'll need to release the code under an open source (i.e., OSI approved) license, but beyond that, what do you think are the requirements? What about governance models? Are there any examples that you think work particularly well, or not so well?

Wednesday June 16, 2004

Joining the fray

I'm a Distinguished Engineer in the Solaris kernel development group, and have been working on various parts of Solaris for the past 10 years. Most recently, I was part of the team that developed Solaris Zones (aka "N1 Grid Containers"). This is a new feature available in Solaris 10 (available for download via Solaris Express) that lets you divide up a system into different application environments, where each environment is isolated from the rest. For more details, see the BigAdmin page where we've been posting information, or the work-in-progress paper we presented at the recent Usenix Virtual Machine conference. We're also working on a paper to appear at the upcoming Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference.