Communities, Then Customers (Forrester on OpenSolaris)

As you're probably aware, we've been working very hard to rebuild the community, and the momentum, around all our software assets at Sun, most notably the Solaris operating system. Why notably Solaris? As a systems company, the operating system (OS) is among the most important lenses through which our microelectronics, software, systems and service innovations are seen by the marketplace - if the lens is cloudy, you can't see much. As is the case with few other products, our overall market is defined by how big a community of skills, applications and developers we can build around Solaris (and its younger sibling, OpenSolaris) - and only then, by how many customers we can generate. The work to rebuild that developer community was begun in earnest in January of 2005 - the date on which we made the first source code to Solaris available under a free software license. But the investment in innovation (the main reason people care about source code, after all) began far earlier, with projects like ZFS and DTrace beginning about seven (yes, seven) years ago. Other enhancements were more recent - like our embrace of the Postgres community (who delivered a fantastic new 8.3 release into OpenSolaris today), the evolution of Glassfish (which has a similarly long history), and even the inclusion of CIFS (which allows Solaris to be a first class file server for Microsoft Windows machines). The developer community su...

Date: February, 04 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/communities_then_customers_forrester_on

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