I’ve been meaning to comment on OpenSolaris since Sun announced they were moving Solaris to open source a couple months ago. One of my college roommates, Bryan Cantrill, is a well seasoned kernal engineer deep in the operating system. He recently released a new tool called DTRACE which puts an amazing set of diagnostic tools into the hands of the people who have to maintain the machines and applications.

If you don’t know Bryan he is the most passionate person I have ever met. He started hacking Solaris early in our years at Brown and never turned back. It was as if it was his purpose on this earth. What has been really cool about the move to open source is now Bryan could talk in detail about all the work he has done. He can give us a file by file tour us through the code he wrote and why he did what he did. Paired with Sun’s open policy on blogging, it has given everybody a front row seat on a tour of one the most amazing operating system in the industry and what goes on under the hood.

It is a good example of what I love about explosion of blogging. Without the low barrier to personal publishing the only time I would get this perspective is when I had dinner with Bryan.

In part due to his work on DTRACE, Bry was also recently named one of the 35 “top technology innovators under age 35″ by MIT — one hell of an honor. Here is Sun’s press release.