Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Glynn Foster: “Get. Use. Learn. Love. Spread. Only then, in my opinion, can we even think about Contribute…”

Dalibor Topic: “Finishing governance before finishing bootstrapping is a bad idea.”

Jonathan Schwartz: “We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we’re acquiring MySQL AB.”

Simon Phipps: “We’ve got an exciting development bubbling that I hope to be able to announce in full detail at FOSS.IN in Bangalore on Friday when I speak there. Just to give you a glimpse of what’s happening, Sun will be announcing a multi-year award program in support of fostering innovation and advancing open source within our open source communities…”

Matt Asay: “[F]ocus on maximizing abundance, and then sell value around minimizing the complexity inherent in abundance.. The old model was to assume that the value was in the software itself and to therefore lock it up. It turns out, however, as Tim O’Reilly notes, that data is the real value, not bits and bytes. You don’t discover or, rather, uncover, that value until you have abundance.”

Jonathan Schwartz: “[L]ater this week, we’re going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

“In addition to seeking the removal of their products from the marketplace, we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform (in specific, The Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent initiative), and to the legal defense of free software innovators. We will continue to fund the aggressive reexamination of spurious patents used against the community (which we’ve been doing behind the scenes on behalf of several open source innovators). Whatever’s left over will fuel a venture fund fostering innovation in the free software community.”

Bravo.

Jim Grisanzio: “What I find interesting is that Matt uses the phrase ‘we’re getting Solaris versus Linux’ to point to an article titled ‘OpenSolaris will challenge Linux says Sun’ which is actually an abridged article from the more aptly titled ‘Sun: Coders key to Solaris’ rise’ published last week. I blogged about that original article because I loved the quote in there about the OpenSolaris Community. But the version that has people all worked up today is missing eight paragraphs of text from the original. Why? Read both of them and you’ll see the clear difference in tone. And why all the wild headline changes, too? Even if you read the version Matt points to you’d be hard pressed to find anything in the article to substantiate the headline. I mean, really, this is silly. Sun’s Ian Murdock and Marc Hamilton were talking about how the OpenSolaris community is growing, how the technology is improving, and some of the plans we are kicking around to improve things. That’s pretty much it. So, where’s the war here?”

If you read only one article about why we’re doing what we’re doing with Solaris, read this one: Q&A: Sun’s Top Operating System Brass Talk OS Strategy. This absolutely nails it.

Alex Fletcher: “The blogosphere, or at least the hemisphere which cares about such things, has been busy producing references to the latest series of events surrounding Sun Microsystems’ Project Indiana, the binary distribution of the company’s OpenSolaris operating system. For example, last week Enterprise Linux Log featured a story about the state of affairs at a recent NYC UNIX user group in Manhattan where things didn’t seem to go well. However, what I took from news of the event, including commentary from those who attended was entirely different from the way in which the article was seemingly framed.”

It’s interesting how different people can take away very different things from the same presentation. If you’re at OSCON, come hear it firsthand—I’m speaking about Project Indiana today at 11:35 in room E141. And judge for yourself.

I was in New York this past week meeting with a bunch of Sun customers and speaking at several Solaris related events. On Wednesday, just before 6pm, we were on a conference call in the Sun office at 101 Park Ave. when we heard a noise that sounded like thunder, and the whole building shook. When the noise didn’t stop, we stepped into the hallway and looked out the window to see 41st St. filled with what appeared to be smoke, debris hitting and nearly breaking the window, and people running down the street en masse.

We filed down the stairwell and emerged into a scene straight from 9/11—shocked looking men in suits covered in a layer of brown debris, masses of people hurrying down 40th St. as fast as they could dashing across streets without regard for the traffic, cars honking their horns trying to get away through the throng, sirens blaring, cell phones not working, policemen doing their best to maintain control, people crying and holding each other, necks craning to see a plume of “smoke” rising into the sky high enough to obscure the Chrysler Buidling, and that awful roar that just wouldn’t stop.

Of course, the “smoke” turned out to be steam, and the roar was the steam blasting out of an enormous crater on 41st that turned out to be just outside that window. But at the time, no one had any idea what was going on, and with lack of information comes speculation: It’s rush hour, they’ve blown up Grand Central Station, what’s next and when? It took a good hour before anyone knew it was just a steam pipe and nothing sinister.

All in all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience that’s going to stick with me for a long time.