Dear Register,
1. Yes, I’m working on cloud computing now at Sun. It’s been no big secret—it’s on my blog, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn and probably other places.
2. Dave Douglas is my boss… He doesn’t write the code either.
3. Yes, I’m thinking about what will be the cloud equivalent of the Linux distro. In fact, I just wrote a blog post about it last week.
4. No, there is no shift away from open source. Open source is part and parcel of cloud computing, and if you had read the blog post, you’d know I see quite a few parallels between how open source evolved and how cloud computing will likely evolve.
5. Yes, I have no staff. I had no staff when I was chief OS strategist either, and I did all right. Oh, and nice scoop—I’m the one who told you (it’s right there in the video). I’d tell you how many people are working on cloud at Sun (it’s a lot), but well, you probably guessed: We don’t share org charts.
If you had bothered to contact me before publishing the story, I would have helped you write a more accurate version. Then again, accuracy probably wasn’t your goal, was it?
-ian
To be fair, it’s not surprising they don’t know what you do. I worked at Sun until last week, and most of my colleagues didn’t even know you were still on the payroll, let alone what you were working on these days.
Point is, the guy didn’t bother to contact me (and he should have known how to, since I’ve done at least one interview with him). Hell, he didn’t even bother to Google me, or he would have surely referenced my blog post from last week, which fleshes out what I discussed with Barton in much more detail. This is sloppy/sensationalist journalism at its worst. -ian
I wouldn’t bother with the register, for some reason they seem to hate sun and do the sensationalist thing every chance they get. Why bother with them.
I agree with you that the coming cloud is getting more interesting by the day. Netbooks are flying off shelves now. The cloud thing is likely to be the next big thing ever. Highly efficient large distributed data centers designed to service the needs of netbooks and smart phones (I refuse to use the apple designations) are going to be necessary shortly. And so is the OS to make them run. That’s the tough problem to solve.
And what about Yahoo!
Nevermind their interesting package statistics which they seem to have taken from pkg.opensolaris.org without actually researching what those numbers mean.
Joyous quasi-journalism at its finest.
This is about the funniest blog entry I’ve ready today… this week for that matter.
Brilliant!
The day of the fact checking conscientious journalist are over… sensationalism and pablum wins… anyone that can string two words together in a somewhat coherent form is suddenly an author / journalist. Bah!
It’s The Reg. It’s entertainment, like The Enquirer. People don’t expect accuracy, just entertaining bullshit and press releases.
Ian, if you disagreed with the story, please publish the story in your own words.
From my point of view this is just more “deck chairs on the the Sun Titanic”. You’ve hit an ice burg already.
I thought it was great when you joined OpenSolaris. The early results with the new installer were great. But cloud computing? Do you have something wonderful to offer in that arena?
A question, Ian. Would it be possible to connect SunRay2 to your cloud? It is possible to run SunRay2 over internet. So why wouldnt it be possible to connect to the cloud?
Make it possible for ordinary home users to buy SunRay2 (only companies can buy them now), and the Sun cloud will spread amongst the ordinary users. Then they will want the cloud on their work too. This is how Linux gained momentum. Make it easy and cheap for home users, and then it will spread to work. A SunRay2 is cheaper than a computer. Some home users will want to skip buying a computer. This way SUN will sell SunRay2 and spread the use of your cloud.