Robert Milkowski wrote: > Hello John, > > Friday, March 7, 2008, 7:23:42 PM, you wrote: > > > JP> Put these two things together, and you can see Sun's > JP> predicament. Sun *wanted* a community that empowered > JP> application developers, but *got* a community aimed > JP> squarely at kernel hackers. > > I can't agree. If you look only at non-Sun developers contributing to > OS then maybe you're right. If you are looking at OS community as a > whole then I don't belive above statement is right. > > I think most non-Sun people involved with OS are sys admins, > developers, users just testing latest code and providing feedback. > Which is good. >
hey ... this is an interesting bit of history here. Can't resist. :) We had always planned to build a multi-level community that included system administrators, hackers, individual developers, corporate developers, students, professors, writers, users, artists, kernel developers, application developers, driver developers, distribution and appliance builders, customers/partners, governments, etc. I think gamers were even on that original list, too. But although that intention has always been there, we've had to deal with natural constraints and dependencies along the way, so we couldn't necessarily engage all these levels of the community simultaneously. In other words, the opening of Solaris -- code, infrastructure, process, people -- and the building of a global community would have to be a multi-phase, multi-year program. There was no other way given the circumstances, and that should not surprise anyone here. Heck, it took two years just to release most of the code, but during that time we've been out there building a rather diverse community right here on opensolaris.org -- although certainly the entire community is not represented only on this site. So, the OpenSolaris community already has some of the diversity we had hoped would develop. Now, I'd say it's probably more accurate to describe us as technical community right now, but I don't think we set out to build something only to find ourselves with something else. I think we set out to build something, and we are still building. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
