Interview with Jim Grisanzio focalized the synergy of OpenSolaris with the global community.

Discussion included: the process of opening a huge codebase to the public; the unique place of OpenSolaris in the open source community; lessons learned from earlier open source projects at Sun and elsewhere; trading lessons learned back and forth with the Linux community; regional differences in the role of open source technology in Asia; and the reasoning behind Sun’s products and technologies that compete with each other.

Grizsanzio’s eight-year career with Sun has evolved from marketing into Solaris engineering. "It was very interesting to go into the core engineering operation of the company, said Grisanzio, "and get those people in front of the media and the analysts, both for competitive undertakings and just for plain informational efforts." Through his collaboration with the engineering teams and dedication to the OpenSolaris project, Grisanzio was able to help build the community involvement for the integration of OpenSolaris on a global level.

Discussed was Sun’s decision to open its products to the community. "I’m not sure people realize the complexity associated with open sourcing a product, said Scott Swigart, "and you even hear things like, ‘Microsoft should just open-source Windows.’"

Grisanzio said that Sun mapped a multi-year strategy for open sourcing. It was a serious challenge in the licensing and development methodology and business models. "Quite frankly," said Grisanzio, "in fact, we’re still figuring it out… Sparc, Java, and Solaris are the three core products of the company, and to open those up has been quite a learning experience."

"Governance is going to be a big challenge for us, I think, as we move tools and engineers outside," said Grisanzio. "And we will have to decide whether those are the right processes for the open source community, or whether they are too focused on Sun."

"I think that the focal point, to kind of tie these things together," said Grisanzio, "is the OpenSolaris binary distribution, and the fact that it’s surprisingly good. We always felt that we would get good reviews from a technical perspective, because Solaris is so strong technically, but, people seem genuinely happy with it."

According to Grisanzio, "From the perspective of technical advantages, we got a lot of engineering credibility for Solaris 10…ZFS probably is the most important new technology on the whole project, from an open source perspective."

Grisanzio has conversations with the international communities such as in Tokyo where the OpenSolaris community and the Linux community are collaborating. "The Linux community has a vast community and developer base," said Grisanzio, "and that’s what we’re trying to create."

"Through meeting various MySQL people, either in California or here in Japan, I do see a lot of cross-pollination of ideas," Grisanzio said. "I don’t know that we have necessarily changed our strategic models, but we have integrated a lot of ideas that we see working for one another."

There are multiple levels for open communication within the communities. "We have something like 5,000 blogs…" said Grisanzio, "we have hundreds of e-mail lists on OpenSolaris alone, and we’re engaged with tens of thousands of people."

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Interview with Jim Grisanzio

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