OpenSolaris

I worked at Sun Microsystems for a decade in San Francisco and Tokyo, and for six years managed OpenSolaris projects and built communities around the world. I loved it. I learned many valuable lessons during that period and I’m obviously proud of what we accomplished. I’m especially thankful for all the friends I met along the way — people who believed deeply in what we were doing and who genuinely participated in building the community.

The OpenSolaris project was a Sun effort to open the Solaris source code and development infrastructure with the goal of building a global development community. The brand “OpenSolaris” stood for four interrelated components: (1) development community, (2) Sun binary distribution, (3) Solaris source code, (4) website/development infrastructure. The website — opensolaris.org — was comprised of more than a dozen applications providing services to support internal Solaris product development, community software development, and community building operations.

We did a lot in six years as a community. Here’s a quick list of accomplishments off the top of my head:

We talked openly about project plans for a year prior to launching. Created a year long pilot program with hundreds of participants. Published tens of millions of lines of source code in several dozen releases over two years (ON source snapshot from August 2010). Wrote a new FOSS license: Common Development & Distribution License. Built multiple OpenSolaris-branded binary distributions (ISOs no longer available). Started hundreds of projects, communities, and user groups. Engaged multiple corporate and university partners in open engineering projects. Generated a million messages on 400 mailing lists and 200 web forums with 37,000 subscribers. Drew tens of millions of website, forum, and list views. Enjoyed some interesting and productive flame wars. Ran elections, voted for representatives, specified governance processes …

We endured years of baseless attacks from other communities and companies. Created a sponsor program to engage contributors and integrated 500 code contributions (800 offered). Set up 400 Mercurial and Subversion source repositories in 250 projects. Engaged contributors from three dozen countries. Integrated code from multiple corporate and university contributors. Re-implemented closed code. Filed 15,000 bug reports in multiple databases. Delivered thousands of presentations at conferences and universities. Developed a new application to facilitate content translations and localized website and product components into two dozen languages. Shipped 200,000 t-shirts, CDs, guide books, and marketing items. Wrote a half dozen full-length technical books. Shot tens of thousands of photographs …

We wrote courses, training materials, and tutorials used in hundreds of universities. Participated in live audio/video interviews with press/analysts. Opened multiple websites to support community and product development and hundreds of package, source, and binary mirrors evolved. Specified multiple development applications openly in the community. Grew into over 150,000 people in 30 countries: students, professors, kernel developers, application developers, system administrators, managers, users …

We also built infrastructure hosted in three data centers with dozens of systems offering a dozen development services: multiple source code management systems, source code management console, a package and spec file submission application, an automated collection/build/submission application for FOSS, two defect tracking systems, a code review application, a multi platform test farm with open source test suites, a database for user account and intellectual property rights management, a community voting application, mailing lists and web forums, two blogging aggregators, architecture review case data publishing, open source wiki, etc: arc.os.org (decommissioned), auth.os.org, bugs.os.org (decommissioned), cr.os.org, defect.os.org, hub.os.org, jucr.os.org (decommissioned), mail.os.org, opensolaris.org/jive (decommissioned) pkg.os.org (decommissioned), pkg.os.org/contrib (decommissioned), pkg.os.org/pending (decommissioned), pkgfactory.os.org (decommissioned), planet.os.org, poll.os.org (decommissioned), repo.os.org, rti.opensolaris.org (decommissioned), src.os.org, static.os.org, test.os.org (decommissioned), test.os.org/ostep (decommissioned), test.os.org/testfarm (decommissioned).

Site Map. Roadmap …

And much, much more.

So, congratulations to the OpenSolaris community on a job well done under circumstances that at times were obviously challenging. I’m now forever fascinated with how open development projects operate and how people build communities across distance, language, and culture barriers. Communities empower people. That’s important. I take it seriously.

Some of my experiences with the OpenSolaris community are outlined below and many more can be found across thousands of messages on OpenSolaris mailing lists, in hundreds of pages on opensolaris.org, and in thousands of posts at blogs.sun.com/jimgris (note: my Sun blog is no longer active).

A Communications & Project Management Perspective

I managed a variety of projects for Sun Microsystems from June 2000 to June 2010. I started at Sun in Silicon Valley working on several corporate communications teams for the Java and Standards organizations and many of Sun’s Open Source engineering projects. During those early years I worked with some of the company’s most senior and well respected Distinguished Engineers, Fellows, and Executive Vice Presidents. I manged their public engagements at corporate events and industry conferences, wrote their speeches and presentations, advised them about competitive market issues, and ran their press and analyst programs. Overall, I’ve managed communications projects at five companies (Sun, 3Com, Network World, Tufts University, Animals Magazine) in four industries (high tech, biotech, publishing, medical sciences), and during that time I supported hundreds of technical spokespeople while engaging hundreds of media organizations globally. I used all of that communications experience — along with a background in writing and business — to transition into engineering project management and software community development.

In 2004 I moved from Sun’s corporate communications team to Solaris engineering where I participated in the creation of the OpenSolaris project. As a Senior Engineering Program Manager I managed community development projects throughout Sun, on opensolaris.org, and at conferences and universities globally. My core activities supported the opensolaris.org website project — a global software development team responsible for opensolaris.org’s web applications, multi-site server facilities, development infrastructure, and contribution programs. See website roadmaps going back to 2005.

When I managed OpenSolaris projects for Sun I communicated openly and internationally via blogs, mailing lists, social networks, newsletters, websites, conferences, and press/analyst briefings. I created user group and advocacy programs and was a leader in the internationalization and localization effort, where I worked with Sun’s Globalization engineers and community developers on website localization projects. I managed the website infrastructure needs for the community, and participated on the website operations team providing support for users globally. Additionally, I presented OpenSolaris at conferences, universities, user groups, and customer meetings around the world (see a selection of presentations below).

I ran for a position on the OpenSolaris Governing Board in 2007 and lost but ran again and was elected to serve during the 2008-2009 term. While on the board I participated in weekly board meetings, presented sessions about governance at conferences, and drove the initial process to draft new governance documents in an attempt to simplify the community structure. I was also involved in designing and implementing the first community election during the OpenSolaris Pilot Program in 2005 when the governance group was then known as the Community Advisory Board. During that time I managed the year-long pilot program when our team engaged 300 Solaris developers, Open Source leaders, customers, partners, universities, and other teams inside Sun to plan and build the OpenSolaris program from scratch.