Jeff Jackson, VP of Solaris opened our conference. He’s now been in the job for a while and is beginning to stamp his own ideas on the future of Sun’s implementation of OpenSolaris. He characterised his view as moving from function to velocity; velocity has a direction. He wants Solaris releases to meet a customer constituency rather than become the result of a race between his developers.
Another key direction, in meeting our “best on Solaris” goal, his different teams are being asked/told to align with each other, commit to and utilise each others products to ensure our most committed customers get synergy from our developers and development budget.
He announced that Sun is going to place more of its system software into open source, including both Sun Ray & Cluster and that this should be happening soon.
He spoke about the need to strategise around open source. I’m not a fan of the word strategy, it tends to be overused and is often very obviously about knowing what you want and measuring your actions against it. However it also means understanding your choices and their consequences; we need to know what are we looking for, how do the communities govern themselves, how do co-developers join in, how do we empower our customers and collaborators & how do we monetise the open source.
Jeff spoke to us about the consequences of the Sun/Intel agreements. Intel are going to OEM Solaris and they endorse it as the operating system of choice for mission critical applications. This would be less important if Intel weren’t the source of the infamous white boxes. Its obvious that their competitors will need to respond and we should watch this space.
It’s clear to me that Rich Green, is beginning to make a difference, we’re finally fixing our arrogance, a fact re-inforced by Ian Murdock, who recently joined Sun, you can’t have missed it and also spoke this a.m. He emphasised that he’s hoping to help Sun learn from the Linux community because people still choose it and there remain some good reasons to do so. It worked for me; on reflecting what he said, I came to the conclusion we need to do better. Its about substance not presentation.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, and repiblished here, at https://blog.davelevy.info in June 2016.