SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

UK Public Holiday Monday

I'm afraid I don't know why, but tomorrow (Monday August 29) is a public holiday in the UK and I'll be offline unless it gets really dull. We used to call them "bank holidays" but it seems the banks will be open so I suppose this is just a UK "we've not had a break for a while" holiday.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 28 2005, 05:20:15 PM PDT ) Permalink

I/O in iTunes

Richard's new I/O Podcast (inside Sun for the outside world - Inside/Outside) is now available for subscription from iTunes. It joins Radio 4's "From Our Own Correspondent" on my subscription list!

Posted by webmink ( Aug 28 2005, 08:26:57 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Open Source In Action

Interesting news about CD02 using Sun Grid to offer financial analysis as a service here - it's not just Sun then. People are constantly asking about how to make money from open source, yet here's an example and open source isn't even mentioned. The platform - Grid Engine running on Solaris - is an open source platform, so this system validates the open source investments and makes money from it. That money then pays for engineers to contribute more expertise to the respective open source communities, creating more innovation and increasing the opportunity for everyone to succeed more. The virtuous cycle at work again.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 25 2005, 10:15:22 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

No favouritism

Speaking of getting into trouble, the rest of Sara's team were worried that maybe I didn't love them as much as Sara because I'd linked to her blog & not to theirs. I of course regard the OpenSolaris marketing team as the epitome of coolness so here are links to Claire, Laura and Patrick (even if none of them have me in their blogroll apart from Claire). As Jim says, they are a most unusual marketing team, pioneering community-based marketing for Sun, and deserve every encouragement.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 25 2005, 05:24:13 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

I/O Is Here

I just got off the virtual phone with Richard Giles, who is starting a podcast channel called I/O. He plans to roam the halls at Sun providing some transparency through informal interviews with people doing stuff that's in the news or should be. He asks dangerous questions - I hope the resulting interview doesn't get me into too much trouble when it comes out!

Posted by webmink ( Aug 25 2005, 05:19:24 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sara Opens Shop

Delighted to see one of my favourite people from OpenSolaris-land venturing out into blogging - a huge welcome to Sara, who's the person behind a lot of the coolness (and all of the t-shirts) that happen around OpenSolaris.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 22 2005, 03:15:10 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Open Source Ombudsman

A colleague laughed when I mentioned I was going to start an Open Source Ombudsman at Sun. "What a British word", he said. I explained a little what it would entail - that it was a way for people outside Sun to raise concerns about Sun's open source practices. "Ah, a mediator", he said. "No," I replied, "more an advocate. Someone to act on behalf of the little guy within the big corporation."

The Ombudsman is a common feature of public service in the UK. An ombudsman listens to complaints and concerns from individuals and then acts impartially and confidentially on their behalf. It's not always possible to resolve every issue to the satisfaction of both parties, but at least there's a chance for a fair hearing. An Ombudsman is your personal insider who can take your problem and treat it as their own.

Why an Ombudsman - the FreeBSD Story

It all started at the end of 2004 when I heard third-hand that FreeBSD had their license for the Java runtime revoked - they'd complained about it in the annual report. FreeBSD were given a no-charge license to the Java runtime ages ago, on an annual, automatically-renewing basis. Sun's legal department had been changing the terms of the Java runtime licenses (good changes by the way) and had written to their contact at FreeBSD saying the old license could thus not be automatically renewed and a new license needed to be accepted. The community at FreeBSD had no contact at Sun to discuss the matter with casually, read the legal word 'revoked' in the letter and assumed the worst, that Sun had finally turned to the Dark Side and wanted money with menaces or worse.

I took it on myself over the break to investigate, and found that actually there had been a breakdown of communication on both sides. Sun was still extending a free license on friendly terms - the license just needed to be accepted afresh because the terms had changed. I mediated a contact between FreeBSD and Sun Legal and everything turned out just fine - no evil, just a new, no-charge, no-stings license so FreeBSD could include the Java platform in their distribution.

I realised that, if there had been a clearly-visible contact point where FreeBSD could have asked for help, they wouldn't have needed to use their annual report to raise a panic that Sun had turned evil. It was then that I decided we needed an Open Source Ombudsman.

How Do I Use The Ombudsman?

The Ombudsman isn't there to act as Sun's help-desk. Don't write in to chase correspondence, propose business deals, ask for press interviews, look for a job or anything like those things. Write in when you see Sun doing something clueless related to open source communities, software or policy in a way that affects you personally. Send your e-mail to Ombudsman at Sun dot com and include:

1. Your true name and affilliation
2. Your contact details, including a telephone number
3. Your issue in sufficient detail to allow another sympathetic person to speak on your behalf and advocate your issue
4. An indication of whether you want your identity to remain confidential inside Sun (it will never be disclosed outside Sun without getting your explicit permission)
5. An indication of whether you are happy for your issue (anonymised and summarised) to appear on Sun's web site (a planned feature)

What Happens Next

Once the Ombudsman (me at the moment) gets your message, you'll get a reply to confirm your intent and then it will be anonymised and passed to one of the leaders of Sun's internal open source community who will present the issue internally as if it were his or her own. There's no promise you'll get what you want - there is a promise you'll get a fair hearing.

There has already been a trickle of e-mail into the Ombudsman - keep it coming, but please follow the guidelines. Together we can make Sun an even better open source citizen than it is already.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 21 2005, 04:00:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Transparency and relationships

One of the chief things that will make my new job interesting is transparency. All software developers take their work very seriously and personally - it's a craft-work after all. The world of open source software development adds to this a key new element - transparency. It means every insight, every comment - and every slight, every criticism - is likely to find its mark. So is every unintended slight.

Thus a bold challenge to "go ask the FSF" in an OpenSolaris community posting today led to a reply direct from Richard Stallman (so he reads the OpenSolaris forums...), and Gavin's article about the Open Source Office in The Register led to a heated e-mail asking why I thought the JXTA team were unprofessional. Of course, I don't think that and hadn't even implied it, but Gavin's choice of words read a certain way implied it. When I said the JXTA team "just did" open source I meant it was natural and unforced, not that they did it thoughtlessly.

Both are useful reminders for me. As I said, the key change that open source brings about is transparency - it's at the heart of changed business models and also profoundly changes the way software developers relate. At the delivery end, transparency means charging only for the value you add between the commons and the customer. In development, transparency means decisions being open for scrutiny and comments being open to all, for all time. In both cases, it's important to be honest. It's important to be courteous. And most of all it's important to learn to see things through other people's eyes.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 19 2005, 04:59:25 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

OSO - A Milestone on Sun's Journey

Today in 2005 we've reached a milestone. Sun's stated direction is to use an open source model for all its software, and it's become necessary to have a formal co-ordination point for all this activity. So today Sun created a new "Open Source Office" (OSO) to act as the meeting-point for all its open source activities. It's not the first time we've had full-time staff devoted to the care and nurture of open source activity - my good friend Danese Cooper did this for several years before her recent job switch, for example - but having a cross-functional, cross-Sun Open Source Office with a Chief Open Source Officer at its helm is new. I'm thrilled to have the chance to play that role.

There is one innovation, though. OSO will host Sun's new Open Source Ombudsman. If you're worried Sun is acting in a way that's bad for the open source community-of-communities, you can write to the Ombudsman - ombudsman at sun dot com - and one of the community leaders in Sun's open source community will impartially and confidentially handle the e-mail and take the necessary steps to escalate the issue and work on your behalf.

There are sadly some who will be surprised to realise this, but Sun has been doing community-based development for all its life. Right from the start with BSD Unix and Bill Joy, up to the most recent developments with OpenSolaris and more, much of the software development Sun has done has involved community-visible, "open room" development of some sort. It's been so much a part of so many projects that it's just been taken for granted, like system test or documentation.

Since the term "open source" was popularised back in 1998, more and more of that "open room" development has become Open Source development, scattered throughout the company. Each project is unique - different people working on different code in different ways with different communities. When Sun's open source projects have spoken, it's sometimes been clear that they're working in different ways, sometimes with philosophical outlooks as different as they could be while remaining open source.

The new OSO is not about centralisation and control - Sun's internal open source communities would just work round that. Rather, it's about bringing leaders together so they can influence each other, promote best practice (avoiding license proliferation, for example) and behave in a relatively co-ordinated way in the outside world. Each community will still do its own thing - the Sun engineers working on Derby at Apache for example will not have the same culture and goals as the Sun engineers working on GNOME - but the internal community, a microcosm of the full open source community-of-communities, can use peer pressure to weed out the occasional accidental cluelessness of its members.

So that's the plan. The lightest touch possible to bring all Sun's many and diverse open source activities together to form an internal community, for the good of both Sun and the wider open source meta-community. Not itself the destination, just another milestone on Sun's journey.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 18 2005, 03:11:51 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [7]

Copyright Office Tries to Turn Back Time

Congratulations and cheering are in order today as Mozilla's Firefox web browser has just passed the 80 million download point - quite ironic in the light of the move by the US Copyright Office worthy of the 1990s to ensure that you can only use Microsoft's web browser to access their web site to file advance patents. They've called for comments and the community here at Sun is preparing a formal response to be sent, in quintuplicate on paper as they request, to explain to them the anti-competitive nature of their actions and the risks of promoting a monoculture. Some handy facts:

• In May 2005, over 60% of the visits to Sun's web site were conducted with browsers other than Internet Explorer
• Microsoft don't make a web browser for any Unix platform, including Sun's Solaris 10, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, or for any desktop environment they host such as Sun's Java Desktop System

So the Copyright Office wants to mandate a non-standards-compliant browser which is implicated in most of the browser security issues that plague the corporate world, ensure that none of Sun's products can be used to file advance copyright claims and ensure Sun's customers are compelled to use competing products. Y'know, that doesn't sound good for a government agency, especially one that's used internationally as well - surely they need to be opening up, not closing down?

My passion sounds partisan, but I'd actually be just as unhappy about the mandating use of any other single browser - I'm hopeful we'll hear from some right-minded Microsofties pointing out the foolishness of the idea too. The participative future involves open standards, not vendor selection.

While I recognise the challenges presented by offering support for the diverse desktop computing market and the many browser options in use, I'd urge the copyright office not to exclude Sun, its customers and the Open Source meta-community from the ability to file advance copyrights. Plenty of companies found browser restrictions like this to be a recipe for lost business in the 90s - please learn from the mistakes of the last decade. It's just all-round the wrong, closed direction to be going as the massively-connected world opens up.

Posted by webmink ( Aug 15 2005, 10:50:15 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]