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Sun University Day
@ NUS:
An Undergraduate’s Personal Take on Ian Murdock’s Talk
By Yap Neng Giin, SoC Computing Engineering Year 4 Undergraduate
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On 24 October 2007, Mr Ian Murdock, Chief OS Platform Strategist
of Sun Microsystems, made a whistle stop at NUS School of
Computing. Touching down in Singapore early the same morning, Mr
Murdock was en-route to Bangkok, but made time in his busy
schedule to give a talk to the NUS community.
The main theme for Mr Murdock’s presentation was “Change”. To
the audience, to whom functioning in a dynamic environment is
part and parcel of everyday life, the theme found much
resonance. Also, many would quite easily associate Mr Murdock
with change. Indeed, his move from Linux Foundation to Sun
Microsystems in early 2007 surprised many: many would remember
him as Linux’s Chief Technology Officer and founder of its
Debian Project in 1993.
Among the enthusiastic audience gathered at the newly
refurbished Seminar Room 1 in COM1 were SoC undergraduates,
graduate students and academic staff. There were also staff from
the School’s IT Unit and their colleagues from the University’s
Computer Centre. Alumni and friends from Nanyang Technological
University were also in the audience.
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Mr Murdock presented his views on open source projects in
general. He shared with us briefly how he came about founding
the Debian project, how he moved on since then, and how he
finally joined his current employer, Sun Microsystems.
As Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun, Mr Murdock sees the
opportunities and possibilities of OpenSolaris. He shared how he
would want to draw the elements of success from his experience
with the Debian project to help Solaris to attain its maximum
potential in the participation age. More importantly, he gently
reminded us that it was not about how Sun could move forward
with Solaris, but how we could move on with OpenSolaris together
with Sun.
In my opinion, the most memorable and enlightening part of Mr
Murdock’s presentation was when he shared with the audience his
seven factors that make an open source project successful. One
of the ingredients he mentioned was the aspect of leadership in
the project. I feel that at times, in the IT sector, we tend to
misplace the importance of soft skills, giving more heed and
attention to technological innovation.
To me, Mr Murdock’s seven factors carefully balance the
importance of the hard technologically innovation, the presence
of the catalytic soft interpersonal skills and the nurturing
support from the community. Mr Murdock himself is an example of
how effective leadership contributes to the success of an
organisation/community (Debian).
Being NUS School of Computing, we could not resist asking the
technical questions. During the Q & A portion, the hot topics of
discussions included Dtrace, zones, ZFS, and other feature
technologies unique to Solaris. The questions pertained to the
availability of these features with Project Indiana. Some of our
inquisitive minds sought to understand the underlying conceptual
frameworks of these features better. In fact, our resident OS
guru Associate Professor Roland Yap raised quite a few
questions. To each, Mr Murdock provided what I consider to be
detailed responses.
Due to his pending flight to Bangkok, Mr Murdock did have to cut
the session short. I believe that many like me felt that time
was too short and we still had many burning questions that we
would like to ask. Personally, I felt that the session did
little justice to the abundant experience that the open source
guru tried to share. Nevertheless, I am quite sure we were all
glad to have had the wonderful experience of hearing Mr Murdock
speak at our campus.
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Page Maintained by: SoC
CorpComm
Last Modified on: 7 November 2007 |
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