Open source! (P.S. DTrace, Zones, ZFS, etc.)

So several of us spoke with analysts and members of the press yesterday on Solaris 10. The idea was that it would be a deep-dive on three of the major technology areas in Solaris 10: DTrace, Zones, and ZFS (a.k.a. the “Dynamic File System”). Of course, at the outset, the press was really only interested in our (pre-)announcements about open sourcing Solaris. We had to spend two minutes at the beginning of the meeting saying yes, we were committed to it, and no, they weren’t going to get any additional information out of us. But I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that one of the stories to come out of that roundtable headlined with open source. From the story, you would think that we spent the entire time talking about open source – it reality, we spent the entire time talking about the three technology areas, and the first several minutes explaining that we explicitly weren’t talking about open source. Oh well…

And for the record, I didn’t say “technically, it is not a problem to do this”, I said “this is not a technical problem.” To me, these have different connotations. I am also attributed in that article with “[w]e’re engineers and we’ve written the cleanest code and we can’t wait to share it with the world.” While this expresses my sentiments accurately, my phraseology got a bit mangled. (For starters, I don’t generally speak in run-on sentences!) What I said is more like: “We’re engineers; we obviously understand the value of having the source code. We believe that we have some of the cleanest code anywhere, and we’re looking forward to showing it to the world.” (And hey: we do have some of the cleanest code anywhere – but somehow I don’t think that we’re going to see a story about the beautiful ASCII art block comments in /usr/include/sys/dtrace_impl.h…)