Meeting Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit in Tokyo in June 2018.

I’ve crossed paths with Linus Torvalds at many events throughout the years, but this was the first time I actually met him and spoke with him. I waited until after his keynote and walked up to the stage, along with dozens of Japanese developers. He stayed afterwards and spoke to everyone and signed shirts and books for about a half hour. I stood off the side of the line and just took photos and listened in on the conversations. When he was finished chatting with everyone I introduced myself and we walked out into the hallway. I mentioned that I was the OpenSolaris Community Manager at Sun. He stopped, looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry!” And we both laughed. I still have bittersweet feelings about Sun and OpenSolaris. It’s a shame how it all ended. I went from working on the hottest project at Sun at the time and being Sun’s #1 blogger (see: BSC front page (hits refreshed daily) to losing those platforms virtually overnight. That wrecked my career and forced me to reset yet again.

Then I told him about the time I spammed the Linux kernel mailing list with my OpenSolaris announcement back in 2005! It was an accident, of course. You see, we had been collecting emails on our website from people who wanted to be notified about the upcoming OpenSolaris announcement. We had already released the DTrace code in January 2005 but hadn’t yet opened the entire kernel. That bit was set for June and then there would be many releases after that. So, for six months about 10K people entered their email address into our web form, and obviously some special friend keyed in the Linux kernel list for kicks. Sure, we didn’t look at or clean the list for spam, but hey, we were all very busy. That OpenSolaris launch was quite a challenge.

Here is my announcement.
Here’s my apology.
Threads from the day (search for OpenSolaris)

Embarrassing. But a lesson well learned. And a good laugh years later with Linus himself. He did ask if I was treated ok by the community after the gaffe, and I said I was. All good. Anyway, we had a good conversation about Sun, Oracle, Linux, and the FOSS community. I’ll take it.

Message to the OpenSolaris Pilot Program

And finally, here’s the private email I sent to the OpenSolaris Pilot Program the day before I spammed the Linux community on OpenSolaris launch day. We ran a private pilot program for a year before we opened the project and those few hundred developers became the seeds of the new OpenSolaris community.

[osol-discuss] Good Luck and Thank You

Jim Grisanzio Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM
Mon Jun 13 17:27:01 PDT 2005

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Hello, OpenSource Pilot Community.

I just wanted to chime in before the fur really flies around here:
Good Luck, and Thank You!

You all deserve Sun's thanks for your efforts and your patience this year. It should be wild day tomorrow, for sure, so light up those blogs and start talking, guys. The engineers are leading this launch tomorrow, make no mistake about it.

Oh, and if you want to bring someone into the program, you *don't* have to call me and sign another f****** NDA. Just do it. I can't tell you how happy I am to not have to dig out another NDA. Not that I could read the damn thing but whatever. It's such a cold way to start a friendly little conversation, don't you think? Also, I've tried to honor as many of your requests (and those from internal people) as possible to get people into the program. We ended up with 145, but quite frankly, dozens and dozens of developers never made it in due to lack of time or resources. We even had a dozen Chinese engineers all briefed, translated, and NDA-signed but couldn't get export control approval in time. It drove me nuts for three months. I'm more than a bit pissed about that one.

Anyway, I hope you are happy with the results of what we are all releasing. The core team here has worked almost non-stop for weeks on this to get ready for the final push. We wanted to do more, you know that, but hey, look at where we were last year and look at the potential tomorrow brings. Also, the OpenSolaris team internally really has been genuine in their intentions, I can assure you. At times we've not been as open as we could have been -- we get that -- but I hope you believe me when I say that many people on the team fought hard on your behalf all year long. Every time you told us we were full of shit on something we took it to heart and it went up line. There were a few, ah, heated,
conversations regarding some of the issues that were discussed in the pilot. We won some and we lost some, but every time we moved a little closer to our goal of openness. As you've seen, this stuff takes time. I wish we could have exposed more of that process to you. Next time it will probably be easier to do that.

As this program has grown it's garnered attention from all across Sun and from Sun's competitors and supporters. Just recently, I've heard from executives and engineers traveling to South America and to Asia, and they report that there *absolutely* is massive community interest out there. Even Wall Street has noticed. Some people are probably a bit confused since the Solaris community was supposed to be dead by now. Well, too bad. It's too late. They lost their window of opportunity to crush us. Our next step is to stay positive and to engage the interest we know is there, make it tangible, and grow this OpenSolaris community. In a very real way, you've all been part of something special here. You've helped change this company and potentially an entire market along the way. Some people may not know this quite yet, but they'll surely find out tomorrow. You are some of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Solaris, and you've help make OpenSolaris a possibility. 

Congratulations and we'll see you on the other side.

Jim