If you follow Jonathan Schwartz, you will have observed a little flurry around our offer of free-trial (and maybe free-for-keeps) T2000 servers. If you read the comments, it’s become apparent that our systems for supporting this kind of marketing promotion, uh, need some work. I’m really glad that Jonathan did this, because I know from bitter experience how bad we are at offering hardware freebies, and this will force us to fix it. Particularly right at the moment, it seems to me a no-brainer that scattering a few of our Opteron and Niagara boxes in the direction of some worthy OSS projects and startup companies would be about the most cost-effective marketing imaginable. On lots of occasions I’ve gone running excitedly to the product groups saying “Hey, it would be really great if we could get XXX a server to try out!” and the reaction is along the lines of “Well yeah, but how would we do that?” It turns out that when you’re a big public company, if you have a defined process in place for doing something, it’s easy and efficient, and if you don’t, you’re in SNAFU territory. Lots of other good stuff in those comments too, check them out. In particular, I happen to know that Wikipedia already has one of the free-trial T2000 boxes, and that’s a very interesting application, so we’re going to work with them see how fast we can make it run on that box. Sun is full of Wikipedia fans.
