On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:40:56PM -0700, Dan Roberts wrote: I'm throwing an oar in here, not to rag on Indiana/OpenSolaris, but because feedback on how we function has been requested.
> Solaris 10 will continue to have Updates to: support the latest > hardware, continue to improve stability, and to port a few key features > developed in the OpenSolaris Community back to Solaris 10 (ZFS boot, key > networking advancements, etc.). Sun will also make new products > available based on OpenSolaris technology designed to work with Solaris > 10 like our NAS appliance, or our xVM Server appliance. And there will > be a future version of Solaris based on one of the 6 month releases of > OpenSolaris, which will bring the latest advances from the broad > OpenSolaris community to Solaris customers. > > Also, let me be clear, the different releases of the OpenSolaris OS are > not the upgrade path for customers of Solaris 10 in the majority of > cases. Future versions of Solaris will be that path, particularly for > anyone that needs long term support (up to 10 years or more). Solaris customers aren't concerned that the OpenSolaris OS is their upgrade path; they're concerned that future versions of Solaris (which will be) will look like the OpenSolaris OS. That is exactly what we keep getting told too: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=205633#205633 Now you are saying a different thing. The fact that Sun don't seem to be able to get the message consistent even internally is a large reason why the community growth is, or is perceived to be, faltering; at this point in time, people don't know what they're building, or what the development process is supposed to look like - or rather they do, but some folk who just released an OS called OpenSolaris aren't following it. The ARC don't have a clue what they're supposed to be doing and have, on numerous occasions, just looked like throwing in the towel. The documented development process requires ARC review unless you are in a particular golden Community Group, it seems. This has been excused with "oh, it's just a prototype" for a long time, but come Monday I don't think we're in prototype anymore, Toto. Not to mention that with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 there will be a large number of folk who will want to check out the code repository; when they're unable to do so, they will be confused and probably annoyed. Pushing a release this hard to try and win minds from what I call the GPL zealot set isn't doing to fly when they can't even get the code. Just watch slashdot when they find out. > Though we are certainly aware that some customers will want to move > certain applications or new systems to OpenSolaris to take advantage of > the latest innovation as soon as possible. Which is one of the reasons > why we are offering full production support right away. Does the existence of production support imply that Indiana/OpenSolaris 2005.08 is considered stable wrt interfaces and so on? > Solaris Express Community Edition builds will continue without changes > for some time. I am very glad to hear that. As for the wider issues of community building, the Doc community doesn't have a Community leader any more; we need one desperately, and what's more, they pretty much must be internal to Sun in order to function properly. That alone speaks volumes about why the community might be having problems. Ceri -- That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all. -- Moliere -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/advocacy-discuss/attachments/20080501/efe58146/attachment.bin>
