As you may have noticed from Adam’s blog, our time at OSCON was a rousing success. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to write up a real post, since I’m on vacation for the next few days. Adam summed things up pretty well; the two points I’d reiterate are:
- We are eager to learn how to do open Solaris right.
Sun has a lot of experience with open source projects, with varying degrees of success. Our meeting with open source leaders was extremely informative; I myself never realized how difficult it is to build a developer community that really works. We’re not just throwing source over the wall as a PR stunt or to get free labor; we’re doing it (among other reasons) to build a thriving community centered around Solaris. And we need you to help us get it right.
- Solaris 10 technology sells itself.
Before our BOF, most people we met were skeptical of Solaris. Because we’re a proprietary UNIX, we’ve gained a reputation of being an old dinosaur: Linux is fast and new and evolving, Solaris is slow and old and stagnant. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it doesn’t take a marketing campaign to convince the world otherwise. Once people see DTrace, Zones, Solaris Management Framework, Predictive Self Healing, ZFS, and all the other great features in Solaris 10, there’s really no question that Solaris is alive and well. Whether you are an administrator or a developer, there will be something in Solaris that will blow you away. If you haven’t seen Solaris 10 in action, get your Solaris Express today and spread the word.
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The funny thing is, had Sun open sourced Solaris back in say 1997 or so, Linux would never have taken off.
Yes, that’s probably true. One thing to note is that this project has been under development for about five years. Open sourcing a decade old proprietary OS with millions of lines of code is not exactly easy. That’s not to say we weren’t late to the game; but every company makes mistakes. And in the dot-com boom days of the late nineties, we certainly weren’t the only ones.
[Trackback] Adam Leventhal has just got back from OSCon and has made some interesting blog entries in the last few days.
Linux, Solaris and Open Source is definitely worth a read. He discusses a conversation he had with Greg Kroah-Hartman about Linux kerne…