Ian Murdock's Weblog

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

Ian Murdock — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:10:00 +0000

Warren Buffett: “A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

Patience

Ian Murdock — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:19:51 +0000

Joe Brockmeier: “The most valuable thing I’ve learned watching Fedora is this: Patience. It takes time and steady, incremental growth to build a solid community. If you’d asked me two years into Fedora’s development whether the project would succeed, I’d have been somewhat skeptical, but looking at the project five years down the road, I’m convinced.”

Order is important

Ian Murdock — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:41:01 +0000

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

Which came first

Ian Murdock — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:52:21 +0000

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

Sun acquires MySQL

Ian Murdock — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:17:29 +0000

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

Watch that space

Ian Murdock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:18:42 +0000

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…”

Abundance and open source business models

Ian Murdock — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 03:03:19 +0000

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.”

Fighting the good fight

Ian Murdock — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:18:18 +0000

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.

Where’s the war?

Ian Murdock — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:35:39 +0000

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?”

Project Indiana, Solaris and the future of operating systems

Ian Murdock — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 10:52:02 +0000

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.