Hi ... happy to kick around your suggestions. Welcome ... Siobhan P. Lynch wrote: > > > I have noticed that much of the OpenSolaris advocacy efforts are in > the usergroup/grassroots areas of advocacy. >
Well, that's one area of advocacy. This Community Group is mostly grassroots I think. But Sun does a lot of more formal stuff, too. And OpenSolaris developers participate in conferences around the world, and the UGs are not always involved in those conferences. Many are, of course, but not all and I'd say it's a minority at this point. Generally, the advocacy for OpenSolaris is very much distributed, just as the community is. And actually, this Community Group is not even the center of it all; it's just one place where a bunch of advocacy-types hang out and talk about issues and form user groups and other projects. > It seems that we?re relying upon the popularity of Solaris during the > early 90?s to establish a ?nostalgia? for a working OS, without > telling people on a larger scale, what has changed, what has gotten > better, why Solaris is now ?Open Source?, and what the licensing > models its distributed under are. > I think there is some nostalgia since the system has been around for many years, but that is not at all where we are growing or even targeting our efforts. We are growing in new markets that are rapidly expanding and many times with people who have never even used the Solaris of the 90s. Also, the most excitement about OpenSolaris is all based around the /new/ technologies, not the older ones. So, DTrace, ZFS, etc. And now with several new distributions, we are starting to build a user community on top of the developer community. As far as the open source nature of the project and/or the license, that's been discussed widely on many lists in many communities and in the media around the world. I'm not sure we can do much more there, but I'm open to suggestions. And actually, it rarely comes up these days. > Many people have misconceptions on the licensing that keep them from > using it in commercial products and/or in their businesses. And while > we know SXCE is not supposed to be used on a production level, there > are many features that make it perfect to help small companies and > developers move in the direction they want to be moving, Solaris was a > picture of stability during the early 90?s, and when people thought of > UNIX, they thought Sun Big Iron, now you can get that same power on > commodity hardware, why not scream it to the world. > You want more corporate publicity? :) That's what Sun does, and I think Sun is surely picking up the volume and will do so more in the future as well. The world is starting to listen, and Solaris is clearly growing in many markets now and analysts are starting to measure that growth. So, we are screaming, but personally, I find that too much aggressive PR turns a lot of people off. We have to find a good balance in there. > A few things I think that would help are things that I?ve seen work > well in the BSD world: > > One: a full list of OpenSolaris (or SXCE/SXDE/Belenix/etc.) features > (even if it?s a Matrix of each one, similar to how Linux advocates do > with different distributions now). A comparison of Linux, OpenSolaris, > and BSD chart, a OpenSolaris News site, similar to Daemon News, and if > that gets large enough, talking to Jeff and Rob over at Slashdot about > a Sun/OpenSolaris Slashdot section (there has to be a demonstrated > need for this, similar to Apple and BSD sections), OpenSolaris BoFs > and meet and greets at conferences other than OSDevCon and OpSol > related conferences (ie. USENIX, SAGE, etc). > OpenSolaris was actually first discussed openly at OSCON, the very heart of the open source community. That's where the kernel engineers held a four hour BOF and told everyone our plans (or our plans at that time, anyway). We've been to OSCON every year since and to other conferences, too. I don't know the Slashdot guys. Perhaps you can talk to them. I like the matrix idea, but I'm not the guy to do it. :) And we have lots of news (Linda and Tim do newsletters, and Terri and Joe maintain the news page on OpenSolaris). I've suggested combining some of the news efforts, but I'm perfectly happy to let them stay the way they are and just grow. Perhaps you can help in the news area since you've written before and have a background in interactive TV. It would be great if you could talk a bit about how we can produce more multi-media content here, and how best we can use that content to build community. We already have some audio and video and such, but I'm sure we can do more and benefit from your experience. > I also think that the name OpenSolaris should be kept for the entire > community, this Consix/OpenSolaris debate is counterproductive, and I > say this from someone outside, looking in. I know that Sun wants to > protect a trademark it spent so long protecting, but as soon as it put > it out there, it semi-lost control, and now to take back the name > would be counterproductive at best, and leave all kinds of bad blood > between people. Let SolarisExpress be the official Sun distribution, > and let the others use ?based on ?OpenSolaris? which is a core set of > code, similar to how Linux is a kernel, and BSD is a toolset. > > Usergroups and grassroots advocacy are huge, but they only get you > part of the way there, what else is being done to ?spread the word?, > so to speak, among those who are not in the Choir? > The entire project is spreading the word. We started from zero. Now we have 10,000 people on 250 lists and 90,000 people registered on the site. We've sent out about 20K Starter Kits. We have 20 million lines of code and several distributions. Universities around the world are teaching OpenSolaris, and Sun has an education program with more than 500 Campus Ambassadors all talking OpenSolaris at school. Then there is the Sun Tech Days World Tour Conference (running for two years with OpenSolaris in dozens of cities), the OpenSolaris Summit, the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, and several dozen other industry conferences where OpenSolaris is presented, not to mention the China and India university programs that are reaching tens of thousands of new students. And I think all the engineering and marketing efforts around Project Indiana (install, packaging, modernization, etc) will help us engage a very large number of new users. That's just off the top of my head. There is probably more going on. Oh, the contest, too ... You bring up good points. And we are doing many of the things you suggest, but it does take time to get the word out around the world. I'm interested in hearing how we can do it better based on what we are already doing. I'm less concerned about reaching everyone, per say, and more concerned about practical steps to ensure our growth. In other words, as we grow to engage more general users, how do we manage that? We are making a transition from a developer-only community to a community that has many more layers. What effect will that have have on governance? How do we as a community do our own community building without having to rely on Sun for resources all the time? I started a thread a while back talking about some of these issues: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=50069&tstart=0 Jim -- Jim Grisanzio http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
