Why I Joined Sun?

I fell in love with Sun technologies, circa 1995 when it released Java. Being a hard core programmer, Java was so exciting when Internet was getting commercialized. That time I was a software director of Osprey Software (a small UK based company, now extinct). I convinced my customer to let me develop a project in Java when it was still in Alpha! It was an X.25 gateway to Internet for accessing Galileo GDS. By that time they did not have an Internet strategy then, but thats another story...
Cut to 2005, Sun had open sourced Solaris! Now that was really sexy!! How sexy? Ask any old time programmer, who worked on AT&T Unix System 7. They will tell you its like Aphrodite disrobing ;)

So I had been diving deep into the source code. Later the same year (?), while on a sabbatical, my brother called me in to help him out with a porting project . He was working for a company, who had outsourced the ISV program from Sun. They had challenge porting an intrusion prevention system from Linux to Solaris. They had hit a roadblock at the kernel architecture level. No one was willing to touch it. So, my brother remembered of a crazy old guy who was spending his sabbatical time drooling over the Solaris source code as if its hard porn!

When he described the challenge to me, I got excited. After a long fight, ably supported by a team of 4 to 5 engineers, I fixed the problem. I had to patch the GLD; just a small change of four lines!!! The open source gld patch worked on Solaris 10!

The customer who was mad at them, was thrilled. And, the patching could not have been possible without the open source Solaris.

Thereafter, to cut the long story short, I contributed a kernel module fuse, also wrote program that made Java faster than C.

I was enjoying life. But suddenly, I was reminded by my wife that I have spent away my sabbatical. She was also against my doing another startup, neither did I have any great idea, to startup anyways.

Ironically, the day, I announced to my open source commune, I got an offer from Uncle Gate's company.

Though I was feeling guilty to join a closed source company, but then I was willing to bite the bullet as the pay was good. I also reminded myself that I must have loved MS technologies, since they recognized me as Dot Net Community Star and That I had co-authored a C# web Services Book.

But thankfully, as the word went out in Linkedin, a Sun folk figured me out and offered me to join Sun. Ok, although Sun could not match MS salary, I opted for it as I would be joining the company that invented Java and owned Solaris!

I am still learning to survive at Sun, but when some of my open source community friends ask me how I feel at Sun. I hum the old Dr. Hook's Song...

Dr. Hook - The jungle to the Zoo

The tiger, he looked out of his cage and smiled
He said come here boy, I want to talk to you a while
He said I once was running wild and free just the same as you
But it's one step from the jungle to the zoo

Its one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, cut your hair, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

He said son when you go running through the grass
You beter look out for all the hidden traps
They'll feed you sweets and goodies 'til you're too fat to move
Then its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Its one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, yank your fangs, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Only one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, cut your hair, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Only one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too.....