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!
Congratulations!
Sadly all the Sun hardware was gone when I went to UA for Computer Science (in addition to the computing legend no longer in the faculty!) but was still able to get my first sparc experiences in the computing labs over in ECE.
Good luck and thank for Debian – Linux distro of choice for the last 4 years.
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Congratulations for your new job. I worked for 3 years at Sun in Switzerland and it’s really a great employer.
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Thank you, great decision!
Remote monitoring.
Hi Ian. I have been a long time Sun admin but we slowly replaced all our Suns for linux. We’re mostly a Dell shop running debian.
We use a monitorization tool: nagios ( http://www.nagios.org/ ). Right now we manage to check the state of the network, services, hardware, and so on and we are very happy with it.
Anyway it’s not easy to check for hardware internals like RAID controller failures, cpu heating and such. We have coded some plugins with SNMP and we are able to get some data from our Dells.
If Sun provided SNMP tables, made nagios plugins and supported nagios someway I know many admins who would gladly choose Sun hardware from now on.
Congratulations,
At least, you have realized that “free software” was not a realistic way.
Next step will be joining Microsoft ;o)
Hasta la vista!
Ian, thank you so much for Debian. I have a dream… (1) Sun relicenses Solaris under GPL v3; (2) hardware support improves to be on par with Linux, without any blobs, non-free firmware or source files lacking a copyright statement; (3) Sun, Debian and Nexenta join forces and make Debian GNU/Solaris the only official distribution of Solaris, blessed and commercially supported by Sun and Nexenta; (4) World Domination!
Welcome……
You are right it is a great & interesting time to be at Sun and I look forward to working with you.
Hmmm. Reading between those lines, it would appear that Sun are going into tha Command and Control of Windows Environment…….. Vista Driving. I hope they have got the chairs bolted to the floor in Redmond.
We are talking about Virtualisation Realised, are we not, Ian, and SurReally Secured OSINT Networking? Operating Systems Management for Operating Systems Management aka New World Order Systems …….ITs Peer [P]Reviewed Crack Troops……… Simply Complex Hacks to Lead with IT Systems Core Processing.
And all that is always dependent upon the Purity of Source Code as supplied by ITs Driver Algorithm……. the Methodology which delivers Creative Innovative Processing from available Information aka Intelligence.
As you say so beautifully understated, “This is going to be fun!”……. a Daemon Sunny Venus Project to complement a HyperRadioProActive Mars Program?
Unless Ray and Oz get their act together to spend a Pile on Semantic Web dDevelopment that IS, that is, rather than just Phishing/Mining MetaData?
I always felt that Sun lost its market position when it started paying too much attention to NASDAQ … or was it NASDAQ’s attention on Sun that caused the trouble!? It sounds like a great fortune for Sun to get an enthusiast back on board with a vision and understanding for technology. Wishing you good luck in your new position!
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Félicitations Ian,
A l’instar de Linus Torvalds, tu viens de démontrer à ceux qui en doutaient encore que le libre n’était pas intrinsèquement viable et qu’il n’est qu’un prétexte et surtout un tremplin pour bâtir ensuite une véritable carrière chez des éditeurs « commerciaux » reconnus comme Sun, Microsoft, Novell ou IBM.
“Welcome in the real world Neo”
Thanks Laurent, you at least kept your troll in French.
Ian,
Congratulations on your new role. Sun needs someone of your caliber and expertise to get the company back on track. Having such vast experience in Linux will allow Sun to become a competitor to RedHat and the Novell/Microsoft front. Your move is a very good one, so good luck to you and I’m very glad to see another great “Strategic” move from Sun.
Best regards,
Martin Shin
(a Debian user)
Well, congratulations on the new gig! It sounds like a fun and challenging position, and it’s certainly a business-card-worthy title.
I was looking forward to working with you at the LF, but I guess we’ll need to find other excuses to get together. Drop me a note when you get a few moments, if you think of it…
Best regards,
Lefty
Finally, Debian gets picked up by a major player !!!
This actually makes a lot of sense. Sun has a lot of x86_64 opteron based machines now and people are running linux on those as well as the other x86 offerings.
Ubuntu is becoming very, very popular and guess what… it is based on Debian. Although Ubuntu seems to be a good company, I have always wondered why a large conglomerate, like Sun, didn’t pick up Ian and Debian and turn it into a major Red Hat competitor. This move will really open up the Linux market with three major Linux distributors in play.
The question is, how do you allocate your resources so that you are maximizing your returns on two operating systems. I wonder if you will see some major convergence of linux and debian into solaris. I know that a lot of linux tools already work on solaris.
What it really comes down to is target market. With the addition of official Sun Linux, you will be able to market sun hardware, running official sun linux to small business segments then big iron sun solaris.
OK, next question – what is going to happen to Progeny? Are you still going to be involved?
Developers – how many Debian developers are you going to pull along with you to Sun? It only makes sense to do away with http://www.dunc-tank.org/ and actually get some major contributors on the Sun payroll and actually get Debian/Sun Linux out the door. But how do you do this while not impeding Ubuntu, a competitor? Interesting…
I look forward to following this over the next couple of years.
Penguin
Important news travels fast, even if it goes in circles more than from here to there :)
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The last time Sun hired a “Linux guy”..remember Cobalt??..we lost Solaris x86. I think many of us Solaris users are a little nervous now.. Should we be prepared to battle another attempt by Sun to force x86/x64 users to switch to Linux? That’s NOT a good thing.
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Ian,
Congarts on the new position, it sounds like a great opportunity for you and the industry. I wanted to mention that this news was even discussed on our internal blog at Intel Corp., which usually doesn’t spend a lot of time on software and open source topics.
Good Luck,
Monte
please, don ‘t forget linux…..and his philosofy
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Congratulations!!!
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I wish the best thing you and than all the projects that you make they are full successes. Personally I am glad very many of the decision that you have taken and history and the time place people where it is deserved.
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Thanks for Debian, and welcome to Sun! I look forward to seeing apt-get level ease-of-use for us purveyors of Solaris.
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This is very good !
Do more, change Solaris to one better desktop! Personal I’m use Solais and FreeBSD, the real UNIX is very better than Linux, but lacks on the desktop. Persons like you hove the power to move Solaris, enterprise with future.
Good look
Marcelo
Exenlent news for the evolution of free software. Sun is going by the good way ;) .
I wish you success and good luck .
Ian,
Welcome! Sun is an extraordinarily interesting and wild ride! Get over to SunLabs as quickly as possible and hang out for a bit.
As a simple user I’m very happy with your intention to increase useability. If users can get the GUI’s they want to effect the work and play they want then most of us don’t need to see any kind of internal workings or other machine interfaces. It’s time for a revolution: How about computers actually working for us instead of the other way around? Of course, that leaves the “real workspace” alone and uncluttered for those blessed few that do the actual systems work so everyone wins.
Again, Welcome!
Ian,
Welcome to Sun.
This is the news many of us have been waiting for!
There are many opportunities for Solaris usability improvements, however the most exciting opportunities, from both an innovation and businsess perspective, are in bringing a Linux strategy and roadmap to Sun platforms.
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Your past achievements let us expects a lot from you within Sun Microsystems…
Congratulations and good luck!!
Congratulations, and welcome to Sun! I Love Solaris, with you onboard, it can only get better…
congratulations
I don’t see why Sun is so great. Personally I just don’t like Solaris. It’s somehow … weird.
Ok, Java is nice, but thats not what you’ll be dealing with, I guess.
Congrats & good luck at Sun. My number one wish for Solaris usability – official pkg-get repositories from Sun. If you can use pkg-get to bring the ease of apt-get to Solaris, lots of people would dance with joy. Also, the Solaris serial-console text install routine does not seem to have the same level of granularity in package selection as the X-win install (especially on the companion CD). It would be nice if the install had a few ready special-purpose recipes a-la Debian tasksel. (Yes, I know about jumpstart/flash installs, but I only want to install one or two boxes and that’s not worth setting up a jumpstart config, so it would be nice if the install CD prompted for package selection)
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Good luck Ian. Maybe it is time to try Solaris… but it will be hard to reach the level of a debian distribution…
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Congratulations on your new position! I love Linux and Solaris on Sun hardware, maybe there’s still a chance someone will beat sparc32 back into shape on Linux. :)
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