Bryan Cantrill

Last updated
Bryan Cantrill
Bryan Cantrill 1.jpg
Bryan Cantrill during a podium discussion in 2007
Nationality American
Occupation CTO at Oxide Computer Company
Known for DTrace

Bryan M. Cantrill (born 1973) is an American software engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition of Sun. He left Oracle on July 25, 2010, [1] to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, [2] transitioning to Chief Technology Officer at Joyent in April 2014, [3] until his departure on July 31 of 2019. [4] He is now the CTO of Oxide Computer company. [5]

Contents

Professional life

Cantrill was born in Vermont, later moving to Colorado, where he attained the rank of Eagle Scout. He studied computer science at Brown University, spending two summers at QNX Software Systems doing kernel development. Upon completing his B.Sc. in 1996, he immediately joined Sun Microsystems to work with Jeff Bonwick in the Solaris Performance Group.

In 2005 Bryan Cantrill was named one of the 35 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review , MIT's magazine. Cantrill was included in the TR35 list for his development of DTrace, a function of the OS Solaris 10 that provides a non-invasive means for real-time tracing and diagnosis of software. Sun technologies and technologists, including DTrace and Cantrill, also received an InfoWorld Innovators Award that year. [6] In 2006, "The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest." [7] In 2008, Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal were recognized with the USENIX Software Tools User Group (STUG) award for "the provision of a significant enabling technology." [8]

Together with Shapiro and Leventhal, Cantrill founded Fishworks, [9] a stealth project within Sun Microsystems which produced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.

He left Oracle on July 25, 2010, [10] to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent. [11] He announced his transition to being Chief Technology Officer at Joyent in April 2014, [12] and held that position until announcing his departure as of July 31 of 2019. [13] He is now the CTO of Oxide Computer company. [14]

He was a member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board. [15]

Controversies and opinions

During an online technical discussion of Solaris with Linux kernel developer David S. Miller in 1996, Cantrill responded to Miller's lengthy comment with a one-line reply, "Have you ever kissed a girl?" [16] In 2015, during a discussion concerning Ben Noordhuis's departure from the Node.js project, Cantrill said that the 1996 comment continues to be cited, decades later, and wrote about his regrets in sending the response, which he called "stupid". [17]

After Cantrill left Oracle in 2010 he compared the company's behavior to the Nazis'. [18] [19]

Cantrill announced at FISL 2012 his strong preference for permissive open source software licenses over copyleft licenses by calling the copyleft GPL license family "anti-collaborative" and "viral." [20]

Articles

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. ↑ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-25). "Good-bye, Sun".
  2. ↑ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-30). "Hello Joyent!".
  3. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "From VP of Engineering to CTO". dtrace.org. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  4. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "Ex-Joyeur". dtrace.org. Retrieved 31 July 2019.
  5. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "The soul of a new computer company". dtrace.org. Retrieved 4 July 2021.
  6. ↑ Neil McAllister (2005-08-01). "DTrace and Predictive Self-Healing herald Sun's future". InfoWorld. Archived from the original on 2012-12-17.
  7. ↑ Michael Totty (2006-11-11). "The Winners Are..." The Washington Post .
  8. ↑ "STUG Award". USENIX. 2008.
  9. ↑ Bryan Cantrill (2008-11-10). "Fishworks: Now it can be told".
  10. ↑ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-25). "Good-bye, Sun".
  11. ↑ Bryan Cantrill (2010-07-30). "Hello Joyent!".
  12. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "From VP of Engineering to CTO". dtrace.org. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  13. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "Ex-Joyeur". dtrace.org. Retrieved 31 July 2019.
  14. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan. "The soul of a new computer company". dtrace.org. Retrieved 4 July 2021.
  15. ↑ "ACM Queue Editorial Board". ACM . Retrieved 2012-02-01.
  16. ↑ "Re: But why?". 1996-10-29. Retrieved 2016-12-17. Have you ever kissed a girl?
  17. ↑ "on: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life". Hacker News . 2015-02-13. Retrieved 2016-12-17. I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter [...] the first thing I would do would be to look [David] in the eye and apologize.
  18. ↑ Bryan Cantrill. "Bryan Cantrill from Joyent on Manta: internet-facing object storage facility that features compute". Hakka Labs. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. "and then, the Nazis invaded [...] for a while I tried to not go to Nazi allegory when talking about Oracle but I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table"
  19. ↑ Bryan Cantrill on twitter If you were an enterprise database customer who hadn't heard of the Nazis, might it be easiest to explain them with Oracle allegory?
  20. ↑ Cantrill, Bryan (2014-09-17). "Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns". YouTube . Retrieved 2015-12-26. Anti-collaborative licensing[ dead YouTube link ]
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