2006 just became history. A very long and strange year for me. Very little remarkable happened, and perhaps thats as it should, I’m settling into life a bit more. But sometimes keepin’ on can be a sign of something positive, that its working, and growing, and maturing. So it is with me and so it is with OpenSolaris.

2006 was an important period in time for OpenSolaris. The fury of excitement surrounding Solaris going open faded away and was replaced with the reality of its usefulness. OpenSolaris and the development community surrounding it became a useful day-to-day community, not just something for us hacking in the middle of the night. The development enviroment around the source has solidified (Mecurial), more and more projects operate in the open, and Solaris itself is getting stronger day by day. The only set backs to speak of were in the area of the OGB, where the entire process fell apart, but in so doing showed just how little we need such an entity to sustain the effort. I think now that we’ve all settled into a grove we’ll have a great position for inclining growth in 2007.

I really want to thank a lot of people who worked hard in 2006, but the list is really long and I”ll leave too many names off. I do want to single out 3 people though: Steve Lawrence, Jerry Jelinek, and Rick McNeal. To everyone involved with, directly or indirectly, Solaris resource management, zone, and iSCSI… these form the basis of Solaris’s future I believe, the future of Sun to a large extent. Your application deployment enviroment simply can’t be bound to an underlying piece of metal anymore, that day is done, its these people and these efforts that are putting an abstraction layer between Solaris and your application enviroment that allow true portability in a real and managable way.

To everyone in Solaris Engineering, to the FE’s and SSE’s, PM’s, everyone in Sun Labs; some damn fine work this year. To everyone in sales, marketing, and the executive team at Sun; this was a great year with a lot of growth and a real return to greatness for Sun, setting the pace of the industry once again, but 2007 will be the year to build on that and bring the company together into a much more unified entity… thats my hope anyway.

To everyone in the community, I think we’ve done well this year. The coming years goal will be tuned toward growth. We’re not fighting FUD or strugglign for life, those battles have been faught and won. We have a superior position we just need to build the community and make evangelism pushes. I fully anticipate massive growth for OpenSolaris in 2007. We have everything we need, with or without a board, and we simply need to get the word out and then engage people back into the various efforts.

On a personal note, 2007 is going to be a breakout year for Joyent. 2006 was a really powerful and exciting year for us, but things are going to get kicked into high gear in short order. I’m looking forward to what we’ll do and what we’ll enable others to do. Good times, and a lot of work, ahead. 🙂