Tag Archives: OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris: 3 Points in a Monsoon

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.

Great Venue for FOSS Meetings

Here’s the view from the conference room at Sun’s Youga office in Tokyo we used for developer meetings. Cool, eh? We held Java, Linux, NetBeans, OpenSolaris, and Barcamp un-conference events up there.

View of Tokyo from the Sun building in Yoga. — View of Tokyo from the Sun Microsystems SBS Tower in Yoga.

OpenSolaris in Berlin in 2007

We had a lot of t-shirts at Sun. This one was my favorite by far. It was understated in color with the dark blue and black but overwhelming and bold with all the FOSS project logos Sun was contributing to at the time. It remains the standard.

Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007.

Jim Grisanzio presenting OpenSolaris in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Photo by Wolfgang Stief.

OpenSolaris at Nanjing University

This was from Nanjing University in China in November 2007. It was still pretty early for OpenSolaris so we used to tag along like a little brother on the Java tours because they were big and we were small. I was nervous at that event. I had to follow James Gosling and he was a big hit. And then me? Uha.

Scott McNealy at JavaOne 2025

Scott McNealy, former founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems and also my former employer, joined the Java team at JavaOne 2025 in Redwood Shores, California in March. I hadn’t seen him since the Sun Reunion in Silicon Valley in 2019 so it was really cool to cross paths again. When I met him before the opening keynote at JavaOne, I told him I missed Sun and OpenSolaris. What else would I talk about with the boss? :) Scott immediately started talking about the AT&T code so he clearly had it all top of mind. Love it.

Scott McNealy and Jim Grisanzio at JavaOne in March 2025.

Forgotten Simplicity and Authenticity

The quotes below can be found down around the end of that Fast Company article. They are the only few bits in there I (mostly) agree with.

Marketers in a dying internet: Why the only option is a return to simplicity
Fast Company, November 2024

“For marketers, the only option is a return to simplicity, while also emphasizing authenticity.”

“People sought community online long before the World Wide Web was a thing, congregating in the USENET communities of the 1980s. And it’ll continue to exist in a similar form, taking place in niche websites and messaging groups.”

But even those bits are narrow and understated. Look, the concept of seeking community is inherent in humans (and many animals, for that matter). It’s not the result of the web, or usenet groups, or websites, or anything else produced by Silicon Valley. Those are just digital tools to extend the real face-to-face work of building communities with real humans in the physical world. It’s interesting that that notion of reality doesn’t appear in the article, which, instead, focuses only on how marketing teams can push their pitches to all those nasty little niches out there. They are chasing clicks. That’s all.

But marketing teams can easily contribute to real software community building programs when directed to do so. They just don’t. And they no longer know how, too. But it gets better. This was an issue decades ago when FOSS really started eating into corporate and closed software programs from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, etc. Oh, goodness, how to handle all of those radical developers storming the gates? Gaaa!

Well, along came The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 which beautifully articulated a FOSS-like specification for direct engagement in the community building process across the firewall. Simple. The mantra back then was “Markets are Conversations.” Cluetrain was basically “open development” for marketing. We implemented the concept years ago for OpenSolaris pretty aggressively in marketing and engineering — the engineers took to it easily, obviously, whereas we had to train the marketing teams and product managers a little bit more. LOL. But back then our focus was more on real world engagements and code contributions. Very different from today.

Anyway, it’s all been forgotten these days and simplicity and authenticity seem silly in the face of all the overt fakery going on via AI. But if you want a simple spec for authentic communications based on FOSS engineering principles then you won’t find a single document that comes close to Cluetrain.

Interviews on the Street: Taiwan

I was in Taiwan last week. And as I walked around I kept remembering a previous trip from 2019 (The Before Times). That was a great trip too! Here’s what it looked like back then when I interviewed the speakers from the event out on the street. I used to love getting out of the conference centers during events and moving to the street for interviews. Need some fresh air! Have to be careful, though. During those interviews we almost got hit by a vehicle flying by! Fun.

Jim Grisanzio interviews Shin Tanimoto at the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019. — Jim Grisanzio interviews Shin Tanimoto at the 2019 Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan.
Photo by Hao Cheng Lee

Jim Grisanzio interviews Joseph Kuo at the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019. — Jim Grisanzio interviews Joseph Kuo at the 2019 Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan.
Photo by Hao Cheng Lee

Jim Grisanzio interviews Ivan Tu at the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019. — Jim Grisanzio interviews Ivan Tu at the 2019 Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan.
Photo by Hao Cheng Lee

Jim Grisanzio interviews David Buck at the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019. — Jim Grisanzio interviews David Buck at the 2019 Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan.
Photo by Hao Cheng Lee

Jim Grisanzio interviewing Michael Hüttermann on Oracle Groundbreakers Tour 2019, Taipei, Taiwan — Jim Grisanzio interviews Michael Hüttermann at the 2019 Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan.
Photo by Hao Cheng Lee

Speakers from the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019. — Speakers from the Oracle Groundbreakers Conference in Taiwan in 2019: Joseph Kuo, Shin Tanimoto, David Buck, Ivan Tu, Michael Huttermann.
Photo by Jim Grisanzio

This is an Oracle Groundbreakers event in Taipei in 2019. It was mostly Java, actually. There were a few Japan Java User Group (JJUG) members there and some international developers too. That’s Joseph Kuo from the Taiwan JUG in the Java Everywhere shirt, Shin Tanimoto from JJUG in the black jacket up front, David Buck from Oracle JPG in the back with the OpenSolaris shirt (my old project at Sun!), Ivan Tu who is a Java and MySQL engineer from Oracle, and Michael Huttermann, a Java Champion and Ph,D on the right.

Here are my images from the event.

FOSSASIA 2024 Hanoi: Images

Here are my images from FOSSASIA last week in Vietnam. Great event. Well worth the week’s vacation and personal investment. 5K attendees. 200 speakers. 50 countries. And 300,000 stream views globally! In fact, all sessions were streamed live, which is awesome because there are very few conferences that can manage that process well at scale with such a low budget.

I did a session about building career by contributing to FOSS communities, and I also met many really interesting people during the week. The event was held at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (here, here) in Hanoi and thousands of students participated, which is cool because back when I ran the OpenSolaris community at Sun years ago I did a lot of work with CS students at universities globally. I loved it. So, it was great talking to these students now about their first experiences getting involved in FOSS communities. I’ll surely be back at FOSSASIA next year!

Images on Flickr

My images from FOSSASIA | More images from the FOSSASIA community
The FOSSASIA conference review blog | Speakers | Schedule | YouTube

Images from my Session

Here are some images from my session on career development.

Jim Grisanzio at FOSSASIA Vietnam 2024. Photo by Toomore.

Jim Grisanzio at FOSSASIA Vietnam 2024. Photo by FOSSASIA.

Jim Grisanzio at FOSSASIA Vietnam 2024. Photo by Ngoc Ruby.

Images by FOSSASIA, Toomore, and Ngoc Ruby.

OpenSolaris at Aizu University

Talking OpenSolaris at an IEEE event at Aizu University in Fukushima, Japan way back in 2007. That event was really cool because the students were international, and many of them were from China and Korea. I visited the university for community events twice when I worked at Sun.

Keynote: Gunadarma University in Jakarta

Doing an OpenSolaris keynote session at Gunadarma University in Jakarta in November 2009. Trying to get my point across and probably forcing it a bit since my shoulders are shrugged. I’m talking to engineering students about contributing to the OpenSolaris project. Great trip. Loved Indonesia.