Open Solaris

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

There's some exciting Solaris news today -- the first part of Solaris
has been open sourced (with the rest on the way -
and also, a record
1,600 Sun patents have been released.)

I'm a big Solaris fan - I used SunOS in college, and since then I've been at Sun
for nine years where Solaris has been my primary development platform. The first five years at Sun
I worked on the Solaris development tools, mostly the debugger, so I really got to
get close to the metal. I therefore found
Bryan Cantrill's blog entry
on the just released Solaris DTrace code really
interesting -- I love source code snippets with juicy comments!

Now that I work on Creator, the platform focus is different since we're trying to
address other platforms like Windows, Linux and OSX. Most of my coworkers work
on those platforms, so I'm the primary "Solaris advocate" in our group.
I work at home three days a week (let's not count the number of nights...)
and it's all on Solaris. On my two days going down to the Sun campus I work
on OSX with my Apple laptop. I really like OSX since I can find a terminal, and
treat it like Unix with a pretty GUI. But I sure miss Solaris facilities like
the p-tools (pgrep, pkill, ptree, ...).