I gave away thousands of these OpenSolaris hats. I wonder where they are now? This was the original OpenSolaris logo in 2005 that represented the entire project — code, project website, and community. Then a year or so later when the OpenSolaris distribution came alone it had it’s own logo, which was based on this one but also had circles that represented communities. Good stuff all around.
Hisayoshi Kato, Taki Yasushi, and Masafumi Ohta talking OpenSolaris at The Developers Summit in Tokyo in February 2009. Remember the Jaris distro based on OpenSolaris in Japan? It was great working with these guys for years during OpenSolaris as we participated in many developer events.
Here I am with Jay Lee in Seoul, South Korea in November 2006 at an OpenSolaris Day. I remember we had been chatting online for a long time and then it was great to finally meet in person. That changed everything. Face to face interactions can’t be beat when you’re building a software development community.
This is me at a nomikai in Tokyo in March 2009 with some developers from the Linux and OpenSolaris communities. Back then selfies weren’t a thing and I was busy shooting everyone else. Then my friend Pietro Zuco took my camera and clicked me. He did that a lot.
Here’s Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons at the Open Source Business Conference 2006 in San Francisco. We were there for OpenSolaris. I remember eating lunch on the floor at the back of the keynote room with another attendee when Larry walked up and asked if he could join us. Wow. I assumed the other guy knew him but, no he didn’t. Anyway, we said, sure, and Lessig then sat down right there on the floor to eat with us and chat. Amazing. The conversation was a mix of FOSS issues and just general bits of life. I’ll never forget it. How many famous professors, lawyers, and global keynote speakers do that? I’ve never seen it before or since (and I specifically look for such things). Then he went up and delivered an awesome keynote. Back then I only had a crap camera so this is all I got.
Hanging out with the Intel OpenSolaris engineering team in Shanghai in October 2007 (also image from 2008 here). I was running a new build of OpenSolaris on my little laptop and I blew it up somehow so they recovered it for me. They seemed to know a lot about the chip set in there — and a lot about OpenSolaris too. It’s a shame the project was killed. It could have been great. You could tell the passion was real and pervasive around the community among all the core developers. It was palpable.
In Bangalore for FOSS India in December 2007. We did technical and community sessions at the event, ran hackfests with community members, and visited user groups and universities. Back then it was normal to do multiple events on every OpenSolaris trip.
Hanging out with some computer science students at the University of Science & Technology of China in Hefei talking OpenSolaris in November 2008. Even Duke came out to chat about Java with the guy there on my left. Seems there’s some foreshadowing there given my current team all these years later.
I used to present The OpenSolaris Story at events all the time. Loved it. This is in 2006 at the China Academy of Science Graduate School in Beijing. I used to tag along with the Java team as they’d duck out from the Sun Tech Days events and visit local universities that were within easy driving distance. We did that all the time back then. Whenever we are at a conference we’d check to see if there were universities nearby. Then we’d stop by to chat about technology while the main conference was going on. It was in and out but we had enough speakers to pull it off. I was especially nervous at this school because the kids were all graduate computer science students so they were especially smart. Me? Not so much. Fun, though. Miss it.
Dinner with the Intel OpenSolaris engineering team in Shanghai in September 2008. There was an engineering team up in Beijing too. I used to go over every quarter for over a decade back then.
