The ambassadors are dozens of Sun programmers who published blog entries for the OpenSolaris launch, sharing personal stories from deep within the Solaris project. The firsthand accounts ranged from Liane Praza's first bug fix to Bryan Cantrill's "Sewer Tour" of some deeply buried Solaris plumbing.

Another programmer, Keith Wesolowski, described Sun's ups and downs trying to adapt Solaris so developers could build it with the open-source GCC compiler and not just Sun's own "Vulcan" programming tools. He also invited outsiders to come fix more than 300 "very small" bugs.

Sun also is using fashionable software to further the OpenSolaris agenda. OpenSolaris blog entries incorporate tags for easy indexing on the Technorati blog-tracking site. And the OpenSolaris source code is available through the BitTorrent file-sharing service--a sharp reversal from Sun's typical practice of requiring a user to register then download code from Sun's own Web site.