Matthew Garrett: “[I]f you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.”
Transparent enough for you?
Cote’: “Check out the sausage being made…”
Come see me at CommunityOne next week
I’ll be making my first big appearance as a Sun employee next Monday at CommunityOne in San Francisco (this is the day before JavaOne). In addition to participating in the keynote with Tim O’Reilly, Rich Green, and Tim Bray, I’ve put together a track called Linux vs. Solaris? designed to show that the gap between Linux and Solaris isn’t as wide as one might think:
All too often, technologies are pitted against each other in the popular imagination, and Linux and Solaris are no exception—“Linux vs. Solaris” certainly does make a catchy soundbyte.
Despite the juxtaposition, Linux and Solaris have much in common—both are open source, have common ancestry, and are similar enough that both users and developers can move back and forth between them with comparative ease. The “vs.” mentality is caused as much by lack of understanding of the “other side” as anything else.
In this track, we will focus on the similarities between Linux and Solaris rather than the differences, the goal being to increase understanding of Solaris among Linux users and developers and vice versa. Where we discuss differences, these differences will be expressed in terms of “how we can learn from each other”. We will also discuss the migration up the stack of developer platforms and address the question, “Do operating systems still matter?” The ultimate goal of the track is to change the conversation: Not Linux vs. Solaris, but open vs. closed.
The track includes four sessions. I’ll kick things off by answering the burning question: “What’s a Linux guy doing at Sun?” Next, Jeff Bailey of Canonical and Bart Smaalders of Sun will take us “inside the sausage factory” to show how Ubuntu and Solaris, respectively, get made. Next, Don Kretsch of Sun and Joe Little of Stanford will show us Solaris Express Developer Edition and Nexenta, two very different takes on OpenSolaris. And last but certainly not least, Josh Berkus, Robert Lor, Harpreet Singh, Tim Bray, and Greg Luck will highlight why the OS still very much matters even as software development moves up the stack.
Of course, there are a number of other great tracks as well. If operating systems are your bag, you should also check out the OpenSolaris track. Fortunately, my times don’t overlap with Ben Rockwood‘s introduction to OpenSolaris, nor will I have to miss the opportunity to see the amazing Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and Mike Shapiro educate, entertain, and gesticulate wildly!
If you’re in San Francisco or the Bay area or are already planning to be at JavaOne, you should definitely plan to attend CommunityOne too. Register today! (P.S. – It’s free!)
First impressions (or: is every Fortune 500 company like this?)
It’s been a crazy few weeks. I’ve heard the phrase “drinking from the fire hose” many times, and while I’ve never actually tried to do that, I suspect the experience is something like this. I’m having a blast though. A few quick first impressions:
- First things first: The lead up to the announcement was remarkable—not at all what I expected from a big company. As Jim Grisanzio pointed out, the PR people did a great job coordinating everything, but the bloggers were very much in the lead here. In fact, I was given so little (OK, no) guidance on what “the message” was supposed to be that I sent a draft of what I was going to post to Jonathan, and he replied, no one is allowed to run their posts by me, just speak your mind, that’s what we all do. The message: Sun really is as transparent as it appears from the outside perspective.
- In the other direction, the people here are not only open to the outside perspective, they want to hear it. That’s a big part of the reason I’m here now. Solaris has lost a lot of developer mindshare to Linux over the past 5-10 years. There are important lessons to be learned from that, and we (yes, I feel like it’s “we” already) are intent on doing just that.
- Maybe it’s just the people I’m working with, but this place feels like a startup. There’s a lot of positive energy, a real sense of urgency, and people genuinely seem to love what they’re doing. The difference: It’s a startup with actual resources. You know, like 30,000+ people. A potent combination indeed.
Regular blogging should resume shortly.
Re Debian “missing a big opportunity”
The timing could have been better (since some will no doubt connect my words to today’s other news), but an interview I did with Linux Format at last month’s LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit was published today, and quickly found its way to Slashdot, where I figured it would end up (read the interview—it’s right in there :-). I knew midway through that I was about to step in it, but these are things that needed to be said, and I’m pleased with how it ended up. Before you throw me to the wolves, read it all the way through, and think about it.
Joining Sun
I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.)
Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.
The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it.
And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy.
It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation.
Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!
Integreat!
Stephen O’Grady: “[D]esktop Linux advocates should borrow a card from Apple, whose job is made infinitely easier by virtue of the fact that they only officially support one hardware platform – theirs…”
The Wi-Fi business model: Like air conditioning—or pay toilets?
New York Times: “WI-FI service is quickly becoming the air-conditioning of the Internet age, enticing customers into restaurants and other public spaces in the same way that cold ‘advertising air’ deliberately blasted out the open doors of air-conditioned theaters in the early 20th century to help sell tickets.”
How about a Gmail Contacts API?
Since I’m on a Google kick these last few days, let me ask a question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time: When are we going to get an API for our Gmail contacts?
Like scads of other people, I use Gmail as my primary mail “client” these days, and that means I want things like email autocomplete to work, which means Gmail has to know about my contacts (or at least their email addresses).
Gmail actually has a really slick interface to contact management that I’d happily use as my main address book. Trouble is, it’s not synchronized with anything, most importantly my cell phone, where I also want that address book to be available. So, for now, I have to maintain two address books—one in Gmail (with just the email addresses), and one in my phone (with everything else). Invariably, it takes effort to keep them “synchronized”, and I’m not always successful at doing so.
I was hopeful that the new “APIs to integrate with existing infrastructure” introduced in Google Apps Premier would finally address this shortcoming—after all, integration with corporate directories would seem to be a feature high on the “must have” list for any enterprise looking at Google. Alas, the APIs appear to only deal with single sign on and account provisioning, and do not appear to do any sort of deeper directory integration.
With an API, Plaxo could presumably synchronize contacts between Gmail and phones (and Outlook etc.), or even better, someone could do over the air synchronization. There have certainly been a wave of interesting products doing similar things using the Google Calendar API. I’ve thought about doing a synchronizer with libgmail, by I’m not sure what would happen (e.g., would I somehow trip the “lockdown in sector 4” alarm, which given my reliance on Gmail, would be pretty darned disruptive).
Thoughts? Anyone else in a similar situation?
Google Reader mobile interface is now usable
Another recent Google discovery: In Google Reader’s mobile interface, there’s now a link at the bottom of each page: “mark these items as read”. Previously, the mobile interface had been more or less unusable because there was no way to mark items read short of actually reading each and every one. Now, if only there were a mobile client a la Gmail for Mobile that would allow me to scroll through my feeds like I do in my browser, only with the Blackberry scroll wheel rather than the mouse scroll wheel, I’d be in information junkie nirvana.