New acquaintances walk away from their first conversation with me and either think that I am in love with a particular vendor or technology or they think I truly hate all technology. Both are true in some fashion.

The fact that I have an OpenSolaris feed on my blog might indicate that I'm a fan of Sun. The truth is I am and I am not. As is true of any large organization, it's really tough to be enamored with all of it. I am a huge fan of Solaris 10 and Sun's initiative to support strict ABI compatibility for stable interfaces, and I'm downright giddy about their ZFS and DTrace technologies. I think Zones/Containers are cool and I think their engineering team has some brilliant shining stars and is on the whole smarter than average. Yet, the OpenSolaris community is challenged in a lot of ways due to the corporate involvement by Sun that leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth. I'm luke-warm about Java and feel like their hardware initiative is going down-hill with bad quality problems on some of their new offerings compared to their spectacularly rock-solid history (sans the E4500).

Recently, I did an interview with Mark Thacker of Sun about our use of Solaris for their Solaris Podcast series. We've had some bad experiences here and there, but all-in-all it has been a win. DTrace has been a god-send and ZFS has saved my bacon several times. Anyone who's talked to me knows that I'm brutally honest and appreciate those that return the favor. I'll look at solution and I tell you what you did wrong. I don't tell you what you did correctly... after all it was all supposed to be done correctly. So, upon listening to this Sun podcast, several of my colleagues said: "that had to have been edited." As marketing people usually do, they attempt to limit the negative exposure as much as possible -- most notably, they removed a section about lack of tight integration between ZFS and Zones which has made for some very painful upgrade paths. We have marketing here at OmniTI too, I know the drill. All-in-all, I think the interview went rather well and fairly represents the benefits we've realized by deploying Solaris 10.