It's all open across the orb!

“The thing that drives a platform is the ecosystem you can build around it,” says Ian Murdock, Vice President, Developer and Community Marketing, Sun Microsystems, in an interview with Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News.

Much like the fire that catches up with just a spark, developer community of Sun Microsystems over the last few years have seen growth northwards and today stands at 652, 610—easily one of the biggest developer bases for Sun worldwide.

Excerpts:

 

When Richard Stallman sent you the response, showing interest in your Debian Linux distribution, what was your first reaction?

I was a twenty-year-old college student at that time and I think I had just started Debian. And to get a response from Richard Stallman was pretty remarkable.

You started way back in 1993 and for a considerable amount of time, there were just 200 developers who were falling under the Debian community and were you feeling threatened that the number would rise? Was there any tense moment during that period?

We actually froze in 200 for a while. It was more of a conscious choice and to operate in an open source company- you have to change the scale you operate in, put processes in place, formalize things and things like that.

We were getting into a stage where we were getting crushed under the load of how the processes were scaling, and I remember that there were people who had said that this is as big as the project could get and today we have about 1500 in it, and obviously that is not true.

I think the best example of how Debian adapted to scale was that in the beginning- there were just a handful of people who were loosely maintaining the software.

Some guy would email me and say- I want to be a developer, he would send me stuff and I would put it across.

At some point, someone said to me –there is increasing amount of people using important things and how do you know that the guy who just asked you isn’t there to sneak into something unwanted.

So, we actually went on to create a sophisticated authentication process in place. To become a Debian developer today, you have to meet another Debian developer and show them your passport and you have to exchange digital signature and there is a web of trust, which is in place in every aspect of the project.

How difficult is it for a developer bred in Linux platform to shift base to OpenSolaris domain and how did you go about this exercise coming from the Debian community?

From a cultural perspective, it’s a completely different problem. I came into an organization that was already very large and had a very long and rich history.

They have their own set of processes, which has worked very well for a very long time and the challenge was how to infuse some of the new thinking into the organization.

The outgrowth of that have been Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris binary distribution network that’s been underway at Sun right now for about six-nine months.

Beyond the internal working of how that was done, if you are a Linux developer and you are interested in Solaris technology such as Dtrace, how do you become a part of this Solaris community, how do you become a Solaris user, how do you take the skills you have learned in Linux and apply that in Solaris or you have to throw them out of the window and acquire a whole new set of skills, and that was part of infusing the new thinking.

Solaris is a great technology and it has a strong foothold in certain markets, the enterprise market and there is this whole new emerging opportunity where Linux is very strong.

If we can figure out as to how to basically package this technology in a way that’s more accessible, familiar and appealing to what this new market wants and that would open up a whole new opportunities for Sun.

How does the Linux Distribution model work?

People often refer to Linux as a single platform and a complete operating system but it’s not that.

Its just one part of the complete Operating System—the kernel part and a very important part.

The role the Linux Distribution is to take the Linux Kernel and aggregate and integrate other open source technologies around it to form the platform, which forms the Operating System.

So, a pool of open source technologies—Linux, Apache, Gnome and various distributions are pooling from that collection of technology and aggregating together.

Now, the problem is that there are pooling from the same technology at different times, they are adding their own patches. At the end of the day, they are all competing with each other, they have to differentiate from each other, and they do things differently.

The popular conception of Linux as the single platform has not actually matched the reality and there are a bunch of different platforms, which are compatible with each other but different in some important ways.

How would you differentiate Solaris and OpenSolaris when it is –‘One platform but with two different mechanisms’!

To the point of Linux not being one platform but being many, the problem with that is on the face of it, it looks like a good thing which means you have a lot of choices—one Linux and you have a whole lot of favors around it but when you think of what drives a platform, the thing that drives a platform is the ecosystem you can build around it and ecosystem that you build around the operating system is what software is available for it.

From Linux perspective and increasingly from the OpenSolaris perspective, we now have a much better integrating story of open source application.

With OpenSolaris, we can now consume open source applications and participate in those communities and make them fully integrated with the Solaris platform.

But think about ISVs, packaged applications, if you look at Linux, even if there are this whole lot of different choices in terms of distribution, the ISVs support just two of them and because even though all of the distributions are mostly compatible it is just isn’t good enough.

So we have to preserve as to how we would adopt this model to Solaris to reach new market, we have to preserve the single platform-compatible core platform while also embracing the choice and flexibility of multiple delivery vehicles.

Basically we have one Solaris- one technology and we think of it as an ongoing stream of innovation in software and operating systems and we have two release cycles on top of that, one which is relatively fast-moving and delivery vehicle to the developer who wants access to developer technology, the developer vehicle for enterprise or start-ups that sees competitive advantage in having that latest technology in production and then we have a slower moving releasing cycle on top of that which is optimized more towards the enterprise or the traditional Solaris 10 customer which is—I deploy this operating system, I deploy everything and I never want to touch it.

So, two different markets and two different sets of expectations, same underlying technology and just frequency of update and support model that is different. That’s what I mean by one platform and two delivery mechanism.

Where do you see all this heading to?

We were late to the game and it’s more accurate to say that we have returned to our roots.

For 25 years, Sun has been about open standards, we have a little bit too much success in the nineties and forgot some of those things and stared death at the face to realize that.

So, you are going to see more things like OpenSolaris reaching new markets, more things like MySQL and bring in more developers into Sun to build that ecosystem around it as developers are the lifeblood of a platform company like Sun.

How are developer’s need changing, are we seeing far enough ahead to understand what developers want and getting their first as opposed to staring death at face next time to make a decision to go there. That’s the beauty of where we are now. We are in a position now where we can think differently!