Remembering blogs.sun.com. I do this from time to time. It keeps me sane. Or maybe not, actually, given what was built and then lost. Nevertheless, BSC is one of the standards on which I judge other communities.
I got my start in public blogging at Sun back in April 2004, which was (thankfully) before social media really took off. BSC was an innovative platform at the time (scalable, group blogging, infrastructure for hosting large files, Apache Roller, based on Java, open metrics, etc). We had thousands of employees blogging regularly in public, and most of them were also on an internal mailing list where we had lively discussions about communicating with external communities. It was a very helpful community (See Related 2 below).
BSC was one of our main tools at Sun to engage all of the FOSS communities we were building at the time. For me it was the OpenSolaris Community. See Simon’s OSPO article for more FOSS at Sun. Anyway, back to BSC. We even had two detailed documents to guide our open communications — Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse, Sun Blogger License Agreement 1.1 — so everyone knew who owned the content and everyone knew what the expectations were for our behavior out in public. The headline here is this — trust was the underlying ethic in this community, and that message was actually quite explicitly stated. As a community, BSC had clear leaders — the people who built the platform, the people who deployed and managed the platform, the bloggers themselves (some of who were/are famous in tech for their code), and an exec or two as well. So for us regular people just blogging and building our communities and projects, we very much knew of this leadership. It was palpable and visible on a daily basis. They led by example, which is rare, so that’s why the experience still sticks with me.
Both Sun and Microsoft (I think MS beat us by a few months) were the first to start corporate blogging back then and they both led for years. Other companies in the Silicon Valley didn’t even come close to the volume of content, much of it technical, that was published by individual employees engaging development and user communities. It’s such a shame that Sun didn’t survive the 2009 financial collapse. The company was in many ways way ahead of its time, and blogging was just one small bit in the mix of innovation.
Related 1: See some images from the Sun Reunion 2019, which was in Silicon Valley. Note that event was held right at the very end of the The Before Times so everything looks perfectly normal.
Related 2: Blog Posted on April 27, 2009 by jimgris:
Linda tells us that BSC is 5 today. That’s amazing. I had no idea. I totally lost track. Well, the truth is I can’t remember my own birthday let alone anyone else’s, so no one should be surprised. I think I take BSC for granted now. It’s just there. It just works. But I shouldn’t take it for granted at all. The application transformed my work life and enabled me to communicate with people all over the world. For that I am most grateful. We even launched OpenSolaris on BSC, and at the time that was a bold and controversial move for Sun — and it caused a few arguments as I recall as well. Back then many of us were new to blogging and communicating in the open, but BSC provided an excellent platform for those involved in OpenSolaris to tell their stories. Directly. No filters.
My first post was a on the 30th of April 2004, just a couple of days after the so-called opening. Initially, I didn’t even know the damn thing was turned on. I followed Danese into a conference room one day and it turned out to be some blogging meeting. I heard rumors but didn’t know anything. I just sat down. I met Tim Bray for the first time in that meeting. Simon was there. Will. And some others but I can’t remember everyone. Half way though, I leaned over and looked at Will’s laptop and he was poking around on BSC. I looked at the URL and said something like “Is that thing on? That’s outside? You didn’t tell anyone?” And he responded (casually, of course) with something like “Yah, it’s live. I just turned it on.” You have to realize how revolutionary that “just turning it on” bit was for Sun five years ago. But that’s pretty much what they did. People found out soon enough, though, eh?
Anyway, Linda Skrocki has been one of the leaders of the BSC effort, and many of the founding members of the platform are still around and still helping guide us all. BSC helped liberate many of the voices we so freely read today because the community is based on trust. More here, here. I don’t think OpenSolaris would have been quite the same without BSC. I wouldn’t either, actually. I’d be getting a lot more sleep. Like now. It’s 2:30 in the morning and where am I? On BSC.
