I’m live-tweeting the session, but Twitter is in trouble, I don’t see
anyone’s tweets but my own, and I guess mine are going into a black hole for
most people who follow me. There is some news here, which you can see (I
believe) by keeping an eye on......
[Disclosure: I have no non-public information on any of the
MySQL-related aspects of the Sun/Oracle transaction, nor on the current
anti-trust review, and I am not speaking for anyone but myself.]
My guess is that the EU will eventually conclude that it would be very
difficult for Oracle to kill or cripple MySQL, even if they wanted to.
I think the more interesting question is whether
Oracle can turn MySQL from a useful technology into an interesting business,
something that in my opinion it’s never been. What I’m worried about, though,
are unintended side-effects.
It’s like this: MySQL just isn’t a very big business, by any measure. And
it represents the sort of Open-Source entanglement that essentially every
major technology player now has one or more of. So, my worry is:...
Further reports from a tribe not my own that speaks a language I have to
work to understand. But I do like computers, and the trade-show floors (note
plural) are beyond vast and have lots of ’em on display, so there are some
big-iron pix in among the tourist narrative.
To warm up, the chaste, minimalist decor of a rack
full of Cisco’s new UCI line. A competitor’s salesguy told me over beers one
night “They’re getting traction here and there just because they cut down on
the number of wires”.
The big deal today was the keynote from
Thomas Kurian,
which included multiple demos and on-stage visits from big-name Oracle
customers.
I watched all of it, feeling like an anthropologist observing a society
entirely foreign to my own. Mr. Kurian was described to me by an insider in...
Big Red via ongoing October 13th, 2009 at 21:00
Which is to say, Oracle Open World. Extremely big. Extremely red.
Item: I’ve never seen the main Moscone-North hall filled to the
edges before. It’s pretty mind-boggling. I heard 35,000 attendees (but
whenever conference organizers give attendee counts, they’re lying) and then,
very specifically, 81,000 hotel-nights, which is a damn big deal. Did I
mention it was extremely red?
Item: Even under this stress, the WiFi held up really quite well. I
didn’t know that could be done. Granted, there are dramatically fewer laptops
open here than at a geek conference.
Item: I hadn’t previously seen Larry Ellison in full attack mode.
The audience enjoyed it, but not as much as Larry did. Sample riff: An
Oracle/Sun combo is stated to beat an IBM offering at a big...
Yep, I’m going to be at
Oracle Open World
next week. It’s way bigger than JavaOne, they tell me; the mind boggles.
I’ll arrive in time for the
Sun-heavy
stuff on Sunday evening, then I’m on the
Oracle Develop
program, speaking Monday morning at 10:15 with Craig McClanahan and Toby Ford
of AT&T, on
Cloud
Stuff at the Hilton. Craig and Toby are both impressive guys, so I
suspect the entertainment value will be high.
I’ll be there through Wednesday, focusing on gossip, booze, clouds,
concurrency, but mostly to try to get to know some more people.
There’s a bloggers’ meet-up!
I’ll be the
guy in a hat with a camera.
The future remains pretty opaque. But with luck, not for......
Boy, there’ve been a lot of releases go by, but officially,
this is
Web Stack 1.5. The Web Stack is a product I’ve been encouraging and
cheerleading for quite a while. What’s interesting, of course, is the list of
ingredients, especially including the Continuous-Integration Suite Formerly
Known As Hudson.
Whenever I do Web development I seem to end up hand-assembling and building
all the bits & pieces, and it takes a whole bunch of yak-shaving time that
leaves me grumpy. I’d love to have a stack pre-built for me, and looking at
the Web Stack bill-of-materials, my impression is that that would about do
it.
This isn’t a new idea; there’ve been a few businesses founded around the
notion of shipping and supporting an open-source Web stack, and none that I
know of have really...
So, Oracle pulled the trigger. Obviously, this happened fast enough that
there’s not a detailed integration plan in place.
I have no inside knowledge but I suspect there may have been a substantial
proportion of gut-feel
in this deal, along with exhaustive analysis. So first, nobody really
knows, in detail, what’s going to happen. Second, the very few people whose
guts had that feel are—appropriately—not saying anything in public. Third, it
seems like everyone with a prognosticator’s megaphone is blaring away, so why
should I compete? But I can’t resist joining in the fun, and I’d
like to invite everyone along.
Here’s how it works. I’ve assembled a big table of all the places you
might line up the Oracle and Sun organizations. I’ve numbered each line....
I work at
Sun because I like computers, so whenever we
announce some, that’s a big day for me.
Today’s iron is
built around Nehalem. There are a couple of blades, a bunch of
rack-mounts, plus 10GE and Infiniband switches (I have seen more than one
internal Ethernet-vs-Infiniband fistfight; juicy stuff for geeks. My personal
bet is on Ethernet).
There will be tons of press releases and so on starting at the Sun homepage
linked above, but for the real poop you need bloggers; the people who built
these boxes and ran the benchmarks. Tushar Katarki has aggregated them in
Sun
rise over Nehalem, which will be live at 10AM Pacific.
Let’s cut Tushar some slack on the cheerleading, he’s been working on these
for a while and has earned the right to a little rah-rah.
It’s called an...
Today at CommunityOne in New York, we’re announcing a bunch of
Cloud-related stuff. Some of it has my fingerprints on it. This is my
personal take on the interesting parts.
[Disclaimer]: Like it says on the
front page, I work for Sun and sometimes
even speak for it officially, but not in this blog. These are my own views as a
project insider, and the perceptions of what it is and why it matters are
mine; the company’s may differ.
Back Story
Just before Christmas, the group I’m in morphed into the Cloud Business
Unit. My
boss called up and said “That’s not for you, right? Want to move over to
GlassFish/Web-tier land?” I said “Hell no, I don’t really grok Cloud but then
neither does anyone else. Put me in, coach.”
So, starting right after New Years, I’ve been...
C1 in NY via ongoing February 23rd, 2009 at 09:00
CommunityOne,
that is. Just a few weeks from now: March 18th and 19th in Manhattan. I’ll be
there talking about my
Android work, and
I’m also working very intensely on some other things we may, with luck, show
the world.
The
program looks genuinely interesting; I’ll be there all day to take it......
Sun is going through a lousy spell right now. Well, so is the world’s
economy in general and the IT business in particular, but this is about Sun.
This is my opinion about what my employer should do about it.
Notices and Disclaimers
This is not an official opinion from Sun Microsystems. Nor
does it reflect any particular insider knowledge; I am not privy to the
executive decision-making process about what the
company should look like after the current transitions.
Internally, I have been
free with my opinions about what the company should do, and while some of those
are private, many aren’t, and now I think sharing them with the world
might be beneficial to the company.
Our Advantages
As I look at Sun’s portfolio of technologies and judge them solely on the
basis of their...
This is certainly our biggest announcement of the year so far; just
possibly the biggest since I showed up here in 2004. The official name is the
“Sun Storage 7000” and there are three systems in the line-up.
As usual, the real actual technology news is in the blogs; start with
co-conspirator Bryan Cantrill’s
Fishworks:
Now it can be told and Mike Shapiro’s
Introducing the Sun Storage 7000 Series. I have some opinions too.
To be 100% fair, I haven’t seen the latest demos from the competition, so
bear that in mind when I say that I’ve been just blown away. Specifically,
our storage guys are claiming that, compared to the competition, these things
are:
Lots cheaper,
Way easier to install and manage,
Immensely more observable, and
Much less power-hungry.
I’m not an...
It’s days like these that make it fun working for Sun.
The new server’s official name is the
T5440; they call
it a “mid-range” box, but to me it looks like a monster; count the numbers for
cores, threads, RAM (hint: it begins with “T”), and so on. It’s astounding
what you can fit into a 4U box these days.
There’s an
official launch
event, but if you want the real poop, you need to start at
Allan
Packer’s blog, where he’s aggregating technical contributions from a bunch
of the engineers who actually, you know, built this......
We launched
Project Kenai very quietly last Friday.
It’s a developer hub with SCM and issue tracking and forums and all the other
stuff you’d expect. We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use
by the world for free.
For a newborn infant, it looks pretty good.
Anyone can visit, but to create a project requires an invitation, which I have
some of;
contact me if you want one. There are lots of
interesting things about Kenai; among other things, it’s a Rails app.
Herewith the details.
Disclosure
I was
in on some of the project planning at the beginning, and have been on some of
the mailing lists, but really can’t claim any credit. On the
other hand, I think I was the first
person to suggest, back when this was getting started, that we do it in
Rails. Once the...
[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got
to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog].
The
Sun Web Stack, shipping later this year, is an agglomeration of Web stuff
(“Formerly known as CoolStack, also known as LAMP/SAMP”), and a
fully-supported Sun product on both Solaris and GNU/Linux. Read on for
details and discussion; this raises some interesting issues.
What’s In the Box?
This list of versions is approximate, but a pretty good guess:
Apache HTTP server version 2.2.8.
Apache modules (e.g. mod_jdk).
Memcached 1.2.5 (with large page support).
MySQL (Community 5.1).
lighttpd 1.4.18.
Tomcat 6.0.16.
PHP 5.2.5 (maybe 5.2.6).
Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, gem 0.9.0, Mongrel 1.0.1, fcgi, RedCloth, readline.
Perl 5.8.8 and extensions.
Squid...
[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got
to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog].
A couple of years ago, Sun’s software group launched the
OpenSSO project, the open-source
version of our big comprehensive suite of identity-management tools.
Now, that project is a supported Sun product:
OpenSSO
Express.
I don’t understand the software deeply enough to say anything
authoritative about it, but the pricing-and-support model is interesting.
What It Is
The products that have gone into OpenSSO are big and complex and
enterprisey; that’s because the whole cluster of problems
around identity (both tech and biz) is big and complex and enterprisey. I’d be willing to bet
that anything else competitive in this space will end up being just as...
[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got
to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog].
We’re open-sourcing Sun’s own Web server (formally the “Sun Java System Web
Server”), using (and here’s a surprise) the BSD license; I don’t know
if we’ve gone BSD before.
I haven’t been near this software, but our product people claim that it’s the “Leading Web server in the
Fortune 100 and Global 250”, and I know for a fact that it’s the one that the
benchmark hot-rodders use when they’re trying to set records on SPEC benchmarks
(and they do set quite a few).
Jim Jagielski gave us a nice friendly
quote for the announcement. Heh, since he also got on stage Friday with
Microsoft to welcome that partnership, I guess Jim is now the...
[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got
to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog].
The
news
is that we’re partnering with Joyent to offer
one year’s free hosting for
Facebook apps. I don’t really understand the Facebook-app ecosystem, but
anything that reduces the barrier to entry has to be good,......
This is gripping stuff. Sun’s chief counsel Mike Dillon posted
a blow-by-blow
report on our in-progress litigation with NetApp on his blog today. The
story of the case is pretty interesting, but the fact that a major
corporation’s Chief Counsel is blogging it in real-time is ground-breaking, I
think.
Just as interesting is the only-slightly-redacted
declaration by
NetApp’s Dave Hitz (PDF), filed in the case, that Mike linked to. It’s a
remarkably unvarnished take on the issues facing closed-source vendors with a
portfolio of software patents in the era of Open Source.......
I spent most of Monday at
CommunityOne,
and it makes me wonder about the future of JavaOne.
CommunityOne
It’s really an entirely-general tech-fest, with obvious influence from
Sun, since we pay for it, and heavy attendance by people who will be coming to
JavaOne and decided to show up a day early. There are ordinary tech presos,
and panels, and an OpenSpace camp for startups, and the RedMonk UnConference
(also OpenSpace), and I probably missed a couple of things.
I generally liked the unstructured feel of the event: “Throw it all at the
wall and see what sticks.” Here are a few pictures that I think give a feel
for it.
For me, the highest energy buzz was around the Startup Camp event, but more
or less everything found an audience that seemed engaged and everything.
The...
As anybody who watches this space knows, we’ve been pouring
increasing
amounts of love on dynamic languages recently. Well, er, on Ruby, to be
precise. But you know, Ruby’s not the only game in town.
So, as of this morning, noted Pythonista
Ted Leung and
Jython lead
Frank Wierzbicki are joining
Sun.
Plus, we’re sponsoring
PyCon and have applied to
join the
Python Software Foundation (it turns
out you not only have to contribute, you have to get voted in).
So, what are these guys going to be working on? I’m not sure.
While we’re using Python internally for
OpenSolaris IPS, nobody
would call us real experts on the language. So my opinion is that Frank and
Ted need build bridges to the community and figure out how we can
help; if we can pitch in as well with Python as we have...
Wow, the Sun-MySQL deal
just closed. That’s amazingly quick work for a
corporate transaction of this size. Mind you, our Chief Counsel
crushes
patent trolls before breakfast. Now we can actually start sharing the
nefarious plots we’ve been cooking up for Sun+MySQL; I hope those guys have
been hatching some......
There’s this guy named
Nick Kew whom I’d never heard of
till last year, when I started working on
mod-atom. He’s
one of the core
httpd gurus, and
wrote the book on Apache Modules,
which is what mod-atom is. So he politely tolerated a flurry of
clueless-newbie questions from me, and I feel guilty that I didn’t buy the
book.
Anyhow, he’s just
come
to work for Sun. I’ve already told him gleefully that I shall now feel
guilt-free about the questions. But seriously, it makes me happy to be
bringing some more httpd expertise on board, given that it’s perhaps the
single most important software component of the whole World Wide Web.
Welcome aboard,......
There’ll be geeks, VCs, hangers-on, and good times, all at the
Launch
Party Vancouver 3 this Friday at the notorious Lamplighter. And there
really is going to be a launch: Sun’s
Startup
Essentials will be doing its Canadian launch. That’s a program that’s
easy to understand. Be less than four years old. Have less than 150
employees. Get cheap hardware.
I’ve got a gig in Austin that day and even though I free up in the morning,
will have trouble getting home for the party.......
On MySQL via ongoing January 16th, 2008 at 09:00
They’re
joining the family. Surprise!
Oh, yes.
What a no-brainer.
[Disclosure]: MySQL was
involved in the process of moving the text
you are now reading from my screen to yours. Hey, I guess I
can look forward to a discount on ongoing’s MySQL
charges. [Um,
isn’t that free? -Ed.]
MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our
hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For
databases, nothing that
matters.
Stand by; this is going to be......
These T5x20 servers we’re
announcing today are a big deal. My bet is
that they end up making Sun a lot of money; but on the way, they’re going to
bring the whole server business (not just Sun’s piece of it) face to face with
some real disruption.
[Update: Wow, dig the
blog
storm.]
This isn’t Sun’s first many-core “CoolThreads” server, but the
first-generation T1 is kind of weird; soaks up huge volumes of Web traffic but
shares one floating-point core and probably isn’t what you’d call a
“General-Purpose” computer. These new boxes are general-purpose all right;
the only weak spot I see is big CPU-bound jobs that
just just won’t parallelize for some reason.
The Tech Problem
With the arrival of the T2, we’re all staring a many-core future in the
face. I’ve...
It’s hard for corporate Web sites to be interesting. My feeling is that
generally, you’d like them to make it easy for people to find what they need,
and otherwise get out of the way. Having said that, there are two Sun-Web
things that, just in the last week, gave me a big smile. First,
FOSS Open Hardware
Documentation. One of the major obstacles faced by the people who build
Free and Open-Source operating systems (i.e. us, the penguinistas, and the
BSDers) is getting the hardware builders to publish specs;
historically, they’ve been frightened of those weird open-source hippies.
Well, we’re a hardware builder, and that page is trying to aggregate all the
specs that kernel-builders might need.
Simon Phipps tells me that this is a big
job, with lots of
legal due-diligence,...
Wow, was my employer ever busy while I was hiding in Saskatchewan. I think
this whole
Eco Innovation
launch is maybe the most important thing we’ve done since I joined in 2004.
There are a whole lot of arrows pointing the same direction: The rising, and
generally uncontrollable, cost of energy. The
space and HVAC constraints in modern data centers. The future of
the planet. It’s not (quite) an
emergency yet, but there are plenty of environmental, economic, and political
scenarios that could land us in (not entirely figurative) hot water pretty
damn quick, alone or in combination. I
suspect the whole industry’s going to be climbing in this bandwagon; it would
be irresponsible not......
Wow, they switched the ticker. It
will be little surprise to hear that the internal conversation has been
sustained and loud. While there have been negatives along the lines of “OMG
WTF PHB!?!?”, most of the internal talk has echoed what they’re saying out
in the blogosphere. I’d like to add a couple of points I haven’t seen
elsewhere, one each on the pro and con side.
My own take? I hate it.
But that’s mostly because I’m a search guy. SUNW
was a 4-character (32-bit!) identifier, unique in just about any context,
meaning, “The publicly-traded equity of Sun Microsystems, Inc.”
Such a token seems precious to me.
Now, our best
equivalent is “NASDAQ:JAVA”. Which will be perfectly effective in the
hands of financial professionals, but some Technorati and...
This
IBM
deal
seems to me dazzlingly simple to understand. Both of us think there’s money
to be made in supporting Solaris, and IBM apparently thinks there are system
sales to be facilitated by including Solaris in the package.
We think that any time anyone’s using one of our products, that makes them a
better candidate to use more of our products.
On the other hand, pundits like Dana Blankenhorn look into the bottom of their
teacup and say we’ll be
leaving the server
business; I saw some finance site running the same speculation.
Um... I don’t think......