Contributor Awards

2006 Contributor Awards

The Winners are:

• Matt Ahrens
• Erast Benson
• Chandan BN
• Jeff Bonwick
• Jon Bowman
• Bryan Cantrill
• Derek Cicero
• Dennis Clarke
• Alan Coopersmith
• Bonnie Corwin
• James Dickens
• Alan DuBoff
• Danek Duvall
• Sam Falkner
• Tim Foster
• Moinak Ghosh
• Teresa Giacomini
• Brendan Gregg
• Jim Grisanzio
• Joey Guo
• Stephen Hahn
• Rainer Heilke
• Glenn Herteg
• Frank Hofmann
• Sarah Jelinek
• Jurgen Keil
• Mike Kupfer
• Stephen Lau
• Adam Leventhal
• Rich Lowe
• Robert Milkowski
• Dave Miner
• Masayuki Murayama
• Michelle Olsen
• Rainer Orth
• Cyril Plisko
• Stephen Potter
• Sumitha Prashanth
• Liane Praza
• Karyn Ritter
• Ben Rockwood
• Joerg Schilling
• Eric Schrock
• Greg Shaw
• Lisa Week
• Keith Weslowski
• Ginnie Wray
• Chen Xiangqu
• Xiang Yong

Nominees are:

In order that they were received:

Ben Rockwood: blogs, documentation, sysadmin work for genunix, and the list goes on and on….

Dennis Clarke: blastwave.org, running the ppc port of Solaris, blogs, demos, screenshots and the list goes on and on

Bryan Cantrill: DTrace, responses to users questions on the DTrace email list, supporting extensions to dtrace

James Dickens: blogs, helping new users both in #opensolaris on irc, email lists, blogging, charts comparing Solaris technologies vs other open source technologies, RFE's and Bug submissions

Joerg Schilling: Schillix, responses to mailing list stuff, RFE's, being a total pain in the butt to deal with when it comes to technical issues

Adam Leventhal: DTrace, supporting issues new users have on mailing lists

Derek Cicero: web admin for all of opensolaris.org and dealing with all user issues that entails

Love him; hate him: Dennis Clarke has been a tireless worker. Yes, he can be a squeeky wheel, but he does deserve the grease.

Moinak Ghosh of Sun Microsystems for his stellar work on the Belenix Project. Moinak has shepherded the project well, is very, very helpful on the list and in person, encourages all new comers to participate. He is a respected member of the Bangalore Open Solaris User Group, and in the Belenix community. I feel he should receive the award for his good work in the Open Solaris community in general, and for his work on Belenix in particular.

Ben Rockwood for being a great asset to the community and doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes.

Robert Milkowski for beating zfs to a pulp so I don't have to.

Dave Miner for bringing the install consolidation out of the shadows. (And putting up with me.)

Brendan Gregg for his work on the DTraceToolkit. The DTrace Toolkit has helped numerous SysAdmin's come up to speed on DTrace, and has been the subject of numerous technical articles. Brendan spent a good deal of time writing this, and deserves to be honored for his exceptional work.

ben rockwood his blog is(was) full of great information about opensolaris and solaris in general, he is one of the guys behind genunix and a lot more, i still wonder if his day has only 24 hours

jim grisanzio i can only hope he keep up the good work when he moves to japan, he's been key in the evangelization of opensolaris

Dennis Clarke he just loves opensolaris, probably more than all the rest of us

Rich Teer A number of years ago, 10?, I was trying to get Solaris 2.5.1 to run multiple Lotus Notes servers in a cluster on a SPARC Center 2000E as well as on some Compaq Proliant 5000 servers. I joined a newsgroup called comp.unix.solaris. I asked questions and I got answers. A guy named Rich Teer was a regular and I sa w a LOT of traffic from him. He was some sort guru that just knew stuff. Lots of stuff. Over time we got to a point where we were chatting on the phone for hours. He has a sharp wit, a kind heart and and great mind. He has done more for the Solaris community over the last decade than anyone I know and he never asks for much. If I am a "squeaky wheel" then Rich is clearly the silent runner who has always been there for years and years and for tons of people when they needed help.

Keith Wesolowski For the precise and profound input on various important issues of OS, both technical and non-technical.

Eric Schrock For the amount of time/help/information he gives on various lists.

Adam Leventhal & Bryan Cantrill For the amount of time/help/information they give on DTrace.

Jürgen Keil For excellent techinical contribution and help on various forums.

Joerg Schilling, Erast Benson, Moinak Ghosh For their excellent technical work on distributions

Al Hopper For fulfiling the leader role and taking standard on important issues.

Ben Rockwood For evangelism and contribution to docs etc. projects.

Jorg Schilling Jorg Schilling has been a realistic voice in the OpenSolaris community, he is not afraid to confront the issues head on and in this he provides some form of leadership whether or not we agree with his direction. Jorg has led the way with his own OpenSolaris distribution and also provided support to the CDDL license by releasing his own work under the license. Although written communication in english is not exactly Jorg's strongest point he provides assistance to many newcomers on the opensolaris-discuss list and more in-depth conversations on other projects. Although putbacks and code contributions so far have been fairly limited I have noticed Jorgs name come up as being tied to 3 or four so far. Overall I am thankful to have someone as talented as Jorg as part of the OpenSolaris community.

Jorg Schilling I'll second that ! And he is a boat rocker and we need talented boat rockers in any successful project.

Rich Teer Contrary to what Dennis Clarke said about Rich Teer ("sharp wit, a kind heart and and great mind" – all untrue ;-) ) my first nomination still goes to Rich for being a Solaris stalwart for many years, and continuing this undertaking on thru OpenSolaris.

Jim Grisanzio for suffering all the early pain of bringing the community together, and managing to keep it on a tight enough leash without throttling it in the slightest. Jim's ability to cut through the warble and come out with just the right level of succinctness is utterly invaluable also.

Ben Rockwood 'nuff said!

Casper Dik for putting together frkit

Dennis Clarke for Blastwave.org

Keith Wesolowski for his behind the scenes work

Al Hopper for setting up genunix.org

Rich Lowe for his numerous code contributions

Alan Coopersmith for his many helpful Usenet posts

Jorg Schilling As a total Solaris outsider who otherwise would have had no business whatsoever outside the comfortable confines of Windows/Linux, I would nominate Jörg Schilling, for lighting up the word "Open" before "Solaris".

Lisa Week Lisa has worked tirelessly to form and run the Colorado Front Range OpenSolaris Users Group (FROSUG), despite making significant contributions to the NFS community through her day job. Lisa has brought in many excellent speakers from the community to get the word out. She's also organized installfests to get people on board, not just informed. Additionally, she's hooked this UG up with other local users groups to connect the dots and grow the community.

Stephen Potter Stephen is the Global Solaris Product Manager for JPMorgan Chase. The very nature of his job is to evangelize Solaris. Steve has been a tireless and driving force within the Solaris community at JPMorgan, and in the Solaris community at large. As one of the Banks primary Subject Matter Experts on Solaris, Steves' drive for standards and best practices permeates throughout the UNIX Infrastructure environment. The Solaris community at large would be the less without his presence and contributions. While not only the Solaris Product Manager for JPMorgan, and just completing his Masters Degree, Steve is also on the Board of Directors of LOPSA (League of Professional Systems Administrators), has presented an Open Solaris talk at the Columbus Linux Users Group (COLUG) and finds the time to be an Open Solaris Contributor with multiple code putbacks. The man deserves an award just for having to be my manager for a year. I'm honored to count Steve as a co-worker, mentor, and friend.

Moinak Ghosh I would like to nominate Moinak Ghosh for his outstanding work on the BeleniX distribution and related OpenSolaris work. I have been interacting with the BeleniX team closely from the time Moinak launched the project and am still amazed at the level of energy and enthusiasm he puts into it. Starting from the initial version which had a minimal desktop and booted quite slowly to the latest version which boots in under 2 minutes and has a complete KDE desktop bundled into a single CD, it has been an amazing journey! Moinak is a quiet worker and a lot of his work sometimes goes unnoticed. I would like to fix that!

Barbara Corwin, Karyn Ritter & James Grisanzio I would like to nominate Barbara Corwin, Karyn Ritter & James Grisanzio for all the efforts they have put it to make opensolaris a success. Barbara (Bonnie) has been involved right from the time the code sweep for ON source started. They have provided all the framework for making the life of all the external contributor very easy. The website is uptodate with the current status of all the contributions. It also has very detailed documentation for Sponsors, Contributors and visitors. I know all this from the minimal interaction. So, I believe their efforts are much more than just this.

Moinak Ghosh Moinak's work on Belenix is well known. His efforts and enthusiam is everlasting. He has also been involved in making a host of applications available (players, games, utilities, etc) for x86/x64 based systems.

Sumitha Prashanth Sumitha has been very enthusiastic about evangelising Solaris. She is co-ordinating with marketing and engineering and arranging talks and demos for our customers. She co-ordinated FOSS.in (http://foss.in/2005/) event in Bangalore and the VTU Edusat presentation session (http://elearning.vtu.ac.in/edusat_bde.htm) that was broadcasted over sattelite across all engineering colleges in Karnataka. She is also evangelising Solaris in Universities and Colleges in other parts of India.

Glenn Herteg For his contribution to IPFilter documentation and feedback on IPFilter code implementation.

Ben Rockwood For his leadership and contributions to the Documentation Community including the wiki, Subversion repository, and migration documentation.

Rainer Heilke For his leadership of the Documentation Community and contributions to the Documentation Style Guidelines and Big Doc List pages.

Joey Guo For his great efforts with the acadmic community in China. 19 universities in China have committed to using OpenSolaris in their academic curriculum next year: sewing the seeds for the project for many years to come.

Stephen Lau For his great work in producing various different ISOs of distros and code, fulfilling a big need. And his incredible patience and good nature!

Michelle Olsen For the very successful "Introduction to Operating Systems: a hands on approach using the OpenSolaris project", produced in double-quick time.

Chandan BN For his contribution of OpenGrok to the community. Chandan has also contributed a lot of his time and talent to provide us with the very cool graphical icons on OpenSolaris.org. Thanks Chandan.

Frank Hofmann He presented three very interesting and deep technical presentation at CZOSUG (see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/osusergroups/czosug/ ). He also contributed "Crashdump Analysis/x86 OS Internals" book to the document community.

Jörg Schilling I would like to nominate Jörg Schilling for his outstanding efforts on behalf of the Solaris and OpenSolaris communities. Jörg has contributed a significant amount of work through his efforts to get star and cdrecord-tools placed under the CDDL, as well as his work on Schillix. In addition, Jörg has gone above and beyond basic expectations in his efforts to help others with issues that relate to Solaris.

Eric Schrock & the ON Kernel Developers Eric is one of the of many Solaris Kernel engineers who've completely embraced the OpenSolaris development process, worked hard with the community to help them understand the OpenSolaris code & ideals and have been a great example to other engineers within Sun on how to do development "outside SWAN". Without Sun engineers like Eric & the rest of the kernel guys, who were willing to change the way they worked, OpenSolaris would have fallen flat on it's face. I'd like to nominate the Solaris ON developers inc. Eric Schrock for an OpenSolaris Contributor award.

Jim Grisanzio As a stalwart of the OpenSolaris community, the work Jim's been doing publicly has been highly visible though his blog : ever enthusiastic, and always positive. I suspect that in the months leading up to Opening Day, Jim was also hard at work behind the scenes, evangelising within Sun, and getting everybody thinking the Right Way. For these reasons, and for being one of the many who helped OpenSolaris get out the door, I believe Jim deserves an OpenSolaris Contributor award.

Top 3 community code contributors: Richard Lowe has offered 33 code contributions since November 2005 and a staggering 23 of them have been integrated so far. Juergen Keil has also offered 33 code contributions — the first one just 2 months after we launched. He is close behind Richard with 21 of his contributions having been integrated to date. Rainer Orth submitted his first code contribution a mere 2 months ago, and he is already the third largest contributor with 27 to date The first community code contributor

Cyril Plisko was the very first community member to offer a code contribution, and it was the first contribution to be integrated. Since then he has contributed to the community as a whole in many different ways.

Top 2 community code sponsors Sarah Jelinek has not only sponsored more community code contributions than anyone else (10 total), she has integrated 9 of them into OpenSolaris. Dave Miner is close on Sarah's heels for both numbers: he's sponsored 9 contributions and integrated 8 of them.

Joerg Schilling for Schillix

Dennis Clarke blastwave.org

Masayuki Murayama for his contributions on various NIC drivers and the on-going effort to incorporate it into OpenSolaris.

Simon Phipps for his always insightful thoughts on open source development and community building, for help in driving these efforts across Sun and for helping to defuse, in language the layperson can understand, many of the myths surrounding the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

Michelle Olson for leadership in the OpenSolaris Documentation community including the production of many critical documentation components such as the initial instructor's guide to OpenSolaris.

Stephen Hahn for driving, as the OpenSolaris technical lead, a number of proposals including the OpenSolaris charter, the start of a draft constitution and perhaps most importantly, the generation of the requirements for the distributed source code management system (SCM) as well driving the evaluation and eventual selection.

Tim Foster for his support of OpenSolaris and ZFS through blogs, discussions and the Irish OpenSolaris user group meetings.

Lisa Week for her continued support and commitment to the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group (FROSUG)

Ginnie Wray for her continued support and commitment to the FROSUG.

Sam Falkner for his continued support and commitment to the FROSUG.

Jon Bowman for his continued support and commitment to the FROSUG.

Jeff Bonwick, Eric Schrock, Matt Ahrens and other ZFS team members for making zfs-discuss one of the most active and successful discussion lists.

Greg Shaw for his numerous technical emails across many OpenSolaris discussion lists.

Robert Mikowski for his numerous technical emails on zfs-discuss and other OpenSolaris discussion lists.

Ginnie Wray For initial work as leader in the Docs community and then for later work as founder of the FROSUG.

Richard Lowe for being one of the most prolific contributors, having a great attitude, being eager to help work on problems, and just overall being a great guy to work with.

Danek Duvall for having far more patience than I would if I were him… and dealing with my infinitely never-ending gate questions.

Liane Praza for SMF. SMF is one of the greatest contributions to Solaris …

Robert Milkowski For always running the very latest in production.

Juergen Keil For his highly technical contributions.

Sara Dornsife and Laura Ramsey OSol is about the community, not just the code. Without a message, no one hears about the community, and no one contributes to the code. Both Sara and Laura have been tireless in their efforts to help spread the word and to make it easier for the rest of us to spread the word as well. Sara has been amazing at accepting input and suggestions from the rest of the community and we are all much better off because of her work.

Sara Dornsife and Laura Ramsey I was drafting up the exact same idea and concept for both Sara Dornsife and Laura Ramsey

James Dickens I don't think that James really ever sleeps and he has helped me and a lot of other people out of a jam at 4AM in the morning. He has extensive knowledge in the area of Solaris and he is a boat rocker also. We need voices like James to get the message out there also.

Professor Chen Xiangqun from Peking University and Professor Xiang Yong from Tsinghua University. These two professors have led a team of professors from universities throughout China to develop a comprehensive set of materials for an operating systems course using Solaris and OpenSolaris as an example. There materials are already available at opentech.org.cn and will be available on opensolaris.org in the very near future. They can be used throughout the world and are a great asset to professors and students who are interested in teaching and learning about Solaris.

Michelle Olson For the development of Introduction to Operating Systems: A Hands-On Approach Using the OpenSolaris Project and for her efforts within the Docs community and beyond.

Ben Rockwood for his excellent blog at cuddletech.com. The howtos, reviews, gossip and rants there have given people like me (experienced sysadmins who haven't had much exposure to *solaris) a great leg up.

Sara Dornsife, Laura Ramsey, and Teresa Giacomini Spread a cross the country, but with a singular mission. These three are professional, efficient, and work hard to get out the good news whenever and where ever there is an opportunity. Not to mention being extremely helpful and easy to work with.

Jim Grisanzio If the community had a father figure, it'd be Jim. Both in front of and behind the scenes Jim is constantly working to hold this project together. Through thick and thin, Jim's been there pushing things forward from the beginning well beyond the call of duty.

Dr. Roy Fielding Asking someone who's not involved in the community to help create it is difficult. Roy has taken on a lot and we're greatly indebted to him for his contribution.

Keith Wesolowski and Dr. Stephen Hahn Professional, insightful, and helpful contribution at every step, on the lists, in the communities, and behind the scenes things that no one ever sees. Both Keith and Stephen provide insight that smooths over some areas that would otherwise be gapping holes in the organization.

Michelle Olson She's as passionate as I am. She really pours herself into her work and has worked long hours and put a lot of love and sweat into the docs community. She's not only had to do her job but define it in a changing environment.

Alan DuBoff We've got dozens of OpenSolaris User Groups around the globe, thanks to Alan plowing the road. Before OpenSolaris was even fully released the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group was formed and meeting regularly. To this day the SVOSUG is one of the most informative and pertinent user groups in the world.

Mike Kupfer and Stephen Lau Mike and Steven both are the hands working away at things that keep the community afloat, including cutting releases, attending trade shows and events, and helping anywhere they can. When you grab the latest code bundle, think of Mike and Steve.

Joerg Schilling SchilliX was the first. He slaved at the release to get it ready and worked through a lot of barriers to get it out the door.