Back when we started OpenSolaris in 2005 at Sun Microsystems, I remember there was great confusion throughout the market, the media, and the development community about what we were doing with the project. People asked us and kept asking us, “What’s OpenSolaris?” This issue was expected, though, and it was a perfectly normal reaction given the history of Solaris and also since we opened the code in many phases over time.
Initially, we released DTrace to demonstrate that we were serious. Then about six months later we released the bulk of the OS/Net kernel source, which still wasn’t a fully functional binary distribution of Solaris you could easily just download and install on your little laptop like Linux. But at least with those first early code releases, developers could build from source, and we could also start building the OpenSolaris community. Over time, though, we released much more of the system’s consolidations, and the OpenSolaris distribution emerged, which made it a nice nascent alternative to Linux. Until Sun’s crash, that is! Oh, well.
Anyway, I remember this session below that I did in Indonesia in November 2009. I started my talk by explaining OpenSolaris with three short points to address this persistent confusion issue. Generally I’d open with this: “OpenSolaris is an Open Source development community, it’s 10+ million lines of Open Source code, and it’s a fully functional binary distribution of Sun’s product called Solaris.” So simple! But as soon as I raised my hand to explain those three bits (see my three fingers there), a massive monsoon hit the town and totally wrecked my concentration.
The roof of the university was made of sheet metal or something so it was so loud! It was like bowling balls pounding down on your head from above. The students laughed because they were used to it, but even with a microphone and speakers, I found it difficult to project my voice and soon lost my voice entirely. It’s interesting that back then I also had a presentation called “OpenSolaris: Opening in a Storm” to illustrate all the technical, political, and business challenges we had on the project. Anyway, after the session in the monsoon I walked outside and the streets were just rivers. Amazing. Great trip. Loved Indonesia!
btw, since the images below are old, I decided to edit them differently and play around a bit.
