Category Archives: [FOS]

Ian Murdock joins Sun, responsible for operating system strategy

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Interesting announcement from Sun today (Tim Bray had it first, I think) that Ian Murdock of Debian fame is joinging Sun as their “Chief Operating Platforms Officer.” Smart move by Sun; it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Ian’s got serious open source chops and even though Debian itself has been languishing of late (he blames the political process), Debian-based Ubuntu has been flourishing. Sal Darji last week pointed out that Canonical just released a server version of Ubuntu.

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Hi all,It’s being announced today that I’m joining Sun as chief operating platforms officer, which basically means I’ll be in charge of Sun’s operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux. I just posted the announcement on my blog (http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/), and it’ll likely be making the rounds soon. Just wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me and to introduce myself.First things first: I’m a long time Linux user, developer, and advocate.

I founded Debian in 1993, co-founded a Linux distribution company called Progeny in 1999, and most recently served as CTO of the new Linux Foundation, where I was (and still am) chair of the LSB, the Linux platform interoperability standard. I’m also a long time Sun fan.

As for what I’ll be doing: While I’m coming in with some fairly formed opinions about what Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris ought to do (peruse my blog a bit to learn more), I’m also a big believer in listening before talking, and I have a lot of listening to do in the weeks to come. So, please, feel free to drop me a line if you have anything to tell me. And, please, be gentle while I get settled. :-)

Gotta get on a call in a few minutes. In the meantime, I just wanted to say hello, and to make sure you heard the news directly from me.

Later,

-ian
—
Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com

Novell and OpenID

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Dale Olds has two (!) good blog entries today about Bandit, in which he describes how Bandit supports other open source identity projects, including OpenID, and adds authentication, authorization, and audit functionality. He writes,

You might say that accelerating convergence, contributing code to other projects, and some authentication code is necessary before we can build effective authorization and audit components. We need a cohesive, distributed identity system. But we also know that when we get such a system, some critical issues involving authentication, authorization, and audit will surface.

Bandit focuses on simple, reusable components for authentication, authorization, and audit. These capabilities are most recognized as needed in enterprise identity systems, but I think they will be needed in other places as well. The recent experiences of the Bandit team and others are confirming this. Once applications or services (web based or otherwise) start to actually be used by more than a few users and sources of identity, they immediately find they need a general, scalable solution for authorization and audit.

Posts here and here.

Dell Ideastorm

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Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Two SmugMug bits: Sun and Amazon

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Interesting comparison of hardware vendors from a photo-sharing site, SmugMug:

Sun ended up winning their business, largely on the basis of the X2200 M2, which is interesting in of itself.  The list of pros and cons is worth reading.  Sun continues to be a fascinating company to watch, with great technology, but backed into a strategic corner with a questionable business model.

Separately, but also from Don McAskill’s blog, an interesting post on Amazon’s S3 service.  I’ve been looking around for a good S3-based backup offering but haven’t found one yet.  Jungledisk seems like it’s the closest, but I’d prefer something a bit more mature.