Background
Cantrill was born in Vermont, later moving to Colorado, where he attained the rank of Eagle Scout.
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.
He left Oracle on July 25, 2010 to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent. He is currently Chief Technology Officer at Joyent. Upon completing his Bachelor of Science 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, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"s magazine.
Cantrill was included in the TR35 list for his development of DTrace, a function of the Operating system Solaris 10 that provides a non-invasive means for real-time tracing and diagnosis of software. Together with Shapiro and Leventhal, Cantrill founded Fishworks, a stealth project within Sun Microsystems which produced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.
In 1996 Bryan Cantrill raised some controversy by his on line response in a lengthy technical discussion with Linux kernel developer David South. Miller, which was cited even decades later. Cantrill announced also his strong preference for permissive open source software licenses over copyleft one, by calling the copyleft GPL license family "anti-collaborative" and "viral".
Sun technologies and technologists, including DTrace and Cantrill, also received an InfoWorld Innovators Award that year. In 2006, "The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in Wall Street Journal"s 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest." 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.".
After Cantrill left Oracle in 2010 he used very strong analogies multiple times to describe his point of view on Oracle"s business behavior.
He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Queue Editorial Board.
