On 06/10/09 02:33, John Plocher wrote: > There was lots of talk about Sun's OpenSolaris 2009.06 distro and all > the features Sun included in it, but I didn't see much at all about > the community itself. Oh, it was there. It was just under the surface, that's all. The community is still too small to fill a large venue like Moscone with a big corporation like Sun running the gig. That's to be expected. Also, OpenSolaris has been technology-focused and Sun-focused from the beginning. Again, that's to be expected too -- at least initially.
Let's not forget that the company did an extraordinary thing four years ago by opening up all this technology and funding all the infrastructure, but I've always said (and still believe) that the responsibility for community development largely rests with the community -- not with Sun. Sun's contribution to the community was to bootstrap the project with source code, tools, engineers, infrastructure, exposure, and some initial community development programs. That's quite an investment, actually. And other companies are starting to participate, too, which is adding a new element to the mix. But we as a community of people need to assert much more of a role in organizing /ourselves/ rather than always looking to Sun to do it for us. That's what the OSUGs have done. Back when we opened the project we had no OSUGs and no OSUG program. No one had any cash to give these guys so we just created a little community on the site and opened some lists and that's pretty much it. Then we moved them to project spaces and gave out some t-shirts and CDs and they just grew organically for the most part. That's why we like the OSUGs. They just went about the business of organizing /themselves/ without always looking to Sun to do the work for them. By the way, later this week we will be exactly 4 years old. On June 14. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
