Newsflash attached. I’ll let you know my thoughts on this, later.

Phipps Ahoy!

I’m delighted to be able to welcome a new colleague who’s starting with Sun today. He is starting a newly-defined role as Chief Operating Platforms Officer at Sun, and is responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun’s Solaris and GNU/Linux strategies. The appointment is at the same time both brilliant and controversial, but is the logical next step as far as I am concerned.

Sun bootstrapped the commercial Unix industry 25 years ago. Solaris offers both an unbeatable promise of binary compatibility, so that your current binaries are guaranteed to run on your Solaris system when you upgrade, every time, and an extraordinary level of innovation that has made ZFS, DTrace, SMF and Zones the talk (and envy) of the operating systems scene.

Meanwhile, the combination of the GNU operating system pioneered by Richard Stallman with the inclusive development delivered around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds has brought a new life and energy to the extended family tree of Unix. The popularity of GNU/Linux bears testament to the vision and skill Stallman and Torvalds exhibit.

And now there is OpenSolaris, bringing the potential to weave a new cloth from both the Solaris and the GNU heritage, albeit with both cultural and licensing challenges to overcome. Today my new colleague is here to perhaps guide the combination of the brilliance of Solaris and the pervasive and seductive character of GNU/Linux to start the next wave. Please welcome the founder of Debian GNU/Linux, chair of the Linux Standards Base and outgoing CTO of the Linux Foundation, Ian Murdock. Welcome, Ian! It’s going to be an interesting year!

Linked/stolen from Simon’s blog; Ian’s confirmation is on his blog.