Joining Sun

I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.)

Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.

The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it.

And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy.

It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation.

Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!

122 comments on “Joining Sun”

  1. Pingback: Ian Murdock is Joining Sun at Jeremy’s Blog

  4. Arthur Tyde

    Ian, congratulations on the new position. I would consider this a reason to pick up shares in Sun. I am equally glad that you are sticking with the LSB. All the best, Arthur…

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  10. Alejandro

    Good luck! I hope that a few years from now, I’ll be able to point people to Solaris as another (working) alternative for a free operating system, along with GNu/Linux, *BSD and the rest.

  12. Patrick Mueller

    “I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building” … oh, the memories come flooding back. But for me, it was the mid-80’s on ascii terms connected to VAXen. In fact, I lived 150 steps from the Math building, on University, for two years, which made for quick coffee breaks …

    Best of luck in the new position.

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  14. Glanz

    This is a good move on SUN’s part.

    I wish you all the luck necessary to complement your extreme competence.
    I wish you success, a lot of fun, and especially, influence.

    This is a good move on SUN’s part.

  16. elijah wright

    I am so pleased to hear that this is happening. As someone who works very closely with both Debian and Solaris systems – building local packages and debugging and generally getting nasty in the bowels of each – I’m delighted to hear that the two worlds are going to come a bit closer together.

    I think that this is going to be an exciting ride for Sun, for Solaris, and for you – I’m very much looking forward to some increased “friendliness” between the Debian project and the OpenSolaris gang in particular.

    Excited? Yes. Delighted? Yes. The world needs more of both, but this is a darn nice start for a rainy March afternoon.

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  20. Justin

    Hopefully you’ll be able to teach sun a thing or two about how package management should work :-)

  21. Teemu

    Thanks a lot for your work for Debian.

    Please, make sure that suncc will be 100% compatible with GCC on Linux :)

  22. Pingback: Venera7.com » Blog Archive » Sun ficha al capo de Debian

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  30. Timo Schoeler

    Oh no! Every nanometre of Solaris going in GNU/Linux’ direction is a dozen Solaris customers less.

    A GNU/Linux guy in this position? Why not George W. Bush as successor to Mother Theresa?

  31. Pingback: Ian Murdock to join Sun, 19/03/07, Secret Plans and Clever Tricks

  32. Andy Cater

    Let’s hope this one goes in in full :) Ian, can you get Sun to support Debian in the same way they do Red Hat/Novell but on _all_ Sun machines – bearing in mind that Debian still supports old Sparcs as well as Opteron hardware. Persuading someone to port apt-get so that I can install GCC and GNU userland tools on Solaris 8 easily would be a real bonus :)

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  38. Brian Masinick

    Ian, I am glad to see you representing Sun, both for the advancement for their numerous fine accomplishments over the years (I got my hands on my first Motorola 68000 series Sun a FULL ten years before you touched yours at Purdue – I was at GM way back then)! That old box was slow… my how far things have come since then!

    Your brainchild, the Debian distribution, remains my favorite. I know that guys like Bdale Garbee represent Debian well at HP. Maybe you can do the same at Sun – and go a few steps farther than that. Get some really tight integration between what Solaris does, both on the server and on the desktop, and what Linux does on the server and the desktop.

    One other thing. I know that most hardware vendors have long since conceded the desktop to Microsoft, including Sun. At the same time, I know that Sun keeps taking jabs at Microsoft, spending fairly significant sums of money to invest in Star Office, not to completely overtake Microsoft Office, but to be enough of an irritation to Microsoft to keep MS out of the Sun sweet spot – the servers. But what if we had IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, Oracle, Sybase, Computer Associates, and others, all putting their best minds together with the idea of coming up with a new generation of desktop that could wipe out anything there now? Oh yeah, find those dudes from Xerox PARC, wherever they may be today. I’ll bet they’d have some innovative ideas. How about putting the collective warchest together from a dozen or so companies, get a few really top notch people on board, and open source a solution to reinvent the desktop and create a whole new market for Sun – and even for Microsoft, if they ever get smart enough to embrace the open model. Just make sure NOT to make it a BSD or Mozilla style license, so that MS can’t walk in and steal it without giving back. Make sure you use the GPL!

    What do you think of those kind of ideas? What might you have up YOUR sleeve?

  39. diabolix

    No offense, but please don’t make Solaris operate like Debain gnu/linux. Being compatable is ok, but I am really not a big fan of linux. It would be a shame for such a great unix to become a linux wannabe.

  41. Brian Tiffin

    Thank you for Debian.

    Have fun at Sun.

    I hope you realize that many, many people have benefitted from your efforts, and the influence will continue for quite some time.

    Once again, thank you.

    Respectfully yours,
    Brian Tiffin

  44. John Clingan

    Ian, welcome aboard!

    I’m sure that I’m not the first to say “thanks in advance” on the desire to close Linux the usability gap, although I do think we’ve come a long way in a short period of time.

    I will watch with great interest the resulting OS strategy.

  45. Patrick Farrell

    Please help bring back some of the charm to Sun. Solaris gets tons more grief than it deserves.

    I was at Purdue around the time you were (taking a Math degree, though). I was on the Next machines in the basement of the umbrella-destroying Math building but fondly remember when I finally got access to a locked computer room with Sun machines that had the Mosaic browser installed.

    Good luck, Ian and thanks for Debian, it changed my Linux life

  46. Pingback: Is Debian doomed? « /dev/random

  47. John Furrier

    I’m dating myself but I remember programming on SUNTools. Good luck on your new job. Please bring back the old SUN. Innovation and computing on the network.

  48. Anonymous

    What happened to the ideology in all these years? Looks like in the end business was more important to you than your visions.

  49. Anon Coward #1337

    Ian,

    good luck in your new adventures with Sun I’m sure you bring boatloads of experience and good ideas to the table. I’ve been hardcore GNU+Solaris for 13 years, in the last 3 I’ve begun to play with Linux. I like Debian because it supports the MIPS architecture (special basement project of mine). Thanks for helping bring x86 Solaris/OpenSolaris to a wider audience.

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