A Week of OSCON

July 28, 2006 6:44 pm General

My first OSCON is nearly over. It’s been a fun week, full of many interesting discussions, and some good sessions and keynotes. The schedule is absolute clusterfuck in terms of being able to see and experience everything that is going on – most of the time you don’t bother, and the important stuff happens outside the sessions. It’s a polished conference, and it’s very clear that there’s years of experience tied up in the conference organizers, yet still keen to try new bits and pieces out with things each year.

It’s been really sweet to catch up with a whole bunch of Sun guys for the first time, drink beer and talk shit. It makes *such* a huge difference being able to get to know a face behind a name on a mailing list. Was good to see Simon’s new Open Source team all out in force, and looking forward to them rocking over the next couple of months.

A couple of random observations and takeaways from the conference, from a Sun point of view –

  • Exhibit Booth: I’m in mixed opinions of whether having a booth is a good use of time and effort. When the hall opened on Wednesday, there was such an incredible rush of people coming in grabbing tshirts and whatever else they could get their greedy hands on trying to avoid any interaction with the people on the booth. Once the free stuff was gone, there was nothing there to entice them in. Despite the best efforts of Brian, Channing, Alan and co, we definitely didn’t have enough OpenSolaris DVDs – we should have sacrificed the widescreen for burning a couple of hundred DVDs. It also would have been good to set up a few racks of our various new machines and advertising our ‘Try and Buy’ scheme. I definitely think it’s good to be part of the sponsorship list for OSCON – it’s still a high quality conference with a lot of pretty influential people involved from right across the free and open source stack.
  • OpenSolaris: It’s pretty clear that isn’t a popular distribution right now [most people seem to be running Linux, OSX or Windows]. We have a lot of work to do. I think there’s definitely interest in it, but the BOF’s were pretty underattended. Seeing Eric demo Google Earth under BrandZ was pretty rad. What we do know is that people are still amazingly confused over where to get OpenSolaris or Solaris, and how to maintain that distribution – hopefully the OpenSolaris Starter Kit that Steve, Teresa and others are working on will help this. Jeff did a good talk about community building within the Ubuntu project, and there’s some no-brainer lessons to be learned from those guys. I’d go further and suggest that Ubuntu’s success is primarily due to the fact that it’s a 6 monthly time based release giving developers the easy opportunity to easily keep in touch with the latest things that are happening in the free software world.
  • Sun and Open Source: Last night we had a pretty excellent BOF on Sun’s Open Source strategy. I hijacked the start of it when the discussion opened asking if the non-Sun people could tell us what we’re doing wrong, and that theme carried on right through the hour we had with some really good feedback. Everyone agreed that Sun is doing heaps better than it was 2 or 3 years ago, but we’re still lacking a coherant message of how Sun’s software stack fits together. Was nice to hear [and drink with, thanks Stephen] some of the analysts be supportive of what Sun was doing.
  • Java: Had some great discussions with Rich, Laura, Gary and Tom about the state of Java and things like java.net. All very encouraging and definitely curious to be a fly on the wall right now at some of the discussions that are taking place in Sun.

Definitely keen to get to next years OSCON – next stop, Menlo Park. I’ll have a short couple of days hanging out in top floor of MPK17, so if you’re around drop by and say ‘hi’.

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