Wednesday, May 20, 2009

THANKS Dr. Bruce Haddon - Software Development Legend

In my 30 years in the computer industry and 21+ years at Sun, no one has been better at discussing Software Development than Dr. Bruce Haddon. Bruce has the rare ability to talk to a CEO one second and the Java Real Time Developer the next. There are countless examples of Bruce speaking to a large group of Developers and the final question is ALWAYS, "Bruce, this is GREAT, when can you come back? " I always went out of my way to attend any of Bruce's talks since I always learned something new and interesting.

There is not enough storage space on http://blogs.sun.com to list all of Bruce Haddon's many accomplishments. I will name just two of a very long list. Bruce was the Father of Java Center Of Excellence (JCOE) as well as my co-author in Software Genius University (SGU). When I was told that we only had one chance to speak to an extremely important customer about software development, my response was always the same, "call Bruce, no one is better on this planet."

Dr. Bruce Haddon is the definition of what the ultimate professional should be.

Thanks Bruce for your INCREDIBLE LEADERSHIP in Software Development at Sun Microsystems with so many customers, Developers, Partners, University students, employees.....

If You Live Your Life Based On Facts....

Below is my /etc/motd on my Solaris 10 Toshiba notebook.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it,
when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager
and unsatisfactory kind it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you
have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.


William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.

This video at YouTube is a must watch if you believe,as I do, in the importance of quantifying challenges. If you want to watch the narrated version, go to this video.

Open Source: Making Money on Technology in a Recession.

In today's incredibly tough economy and with the likelihood that 2009 will be much worse, there has never been a better time to look at Sun software. There is a well written article in eWeek titled Making Money on Technology in a Recession.

The article states: "More optimistically, CompTIA recently released a study of 772 small to medium -size businesses that found that 51 percent said they expect to increase IT spending while 49 percent said they plan to decrease IT spending.

The long and the short of this is that nobody knows for sure what exactly is going on with IT budgets in 2009, other than some companies are trying to cut back some spending across the board, while others are trying to cut back IT spending in some areas so they can spend more money in other areas."

Open source is listed in the number one slot as the main item to consider in IT's recession planning. I would argue that open source should always be #1 on the IT list and not because of cost, because it's smart. Most CxO's that I meet with have dual stack approach for both a legacy/proprietary strategy and an open source strategy.

The open source strategy is something that most CxOs are evolving over time with the Sun's open source software being a significant part of that strategy. Sun has donated more source code than the next five contributors combined.

Below is a link to Sun's Free and Open Source Licensing White Paper

Licensing plays an important role in shaping an open source community. Read about Sun's view on Free and Open Source licensing.


Creative Commons license This whitepaper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.