Rich, In Solaris marketing, we are being very deliberate to NOT conflate OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, and Nevada, although I dare say that currently even many Sun employees do not understand the differences. If anyone has any concerns about Solaris marketing, they should feel free to voice those directly to me.
It could certainly be made more clear on the opensolaris.org home page what the differences are between OpenSolaris code and Solaris 10. But the opensolaris.org web site is not controlled by Sun marketing, it is a community site. I would actually like to see the home page freshened up a bit and explain the differences between OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 among other things. I think we could provide more value to visitors than is there today. I'll discuss with the OpenSolaris team members on my staff, but will again be careful to point out that Solaris marketing does not own or control the home page or the site. Yes, it is hard for marketing types to remember this, but being my first marketing job at Sun, it is easy for me to keep reminding everyone that while we work closely with the OpenSolaris community it isn't a Sun product. We really do believe in community development, so much so that my CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, actually lets me keep well over 1000 engineers working on OpenSolaris code development. Yes, we do derive commercial benefit as well from Solaris, and while some may see that as a conflict of interest, we simply see Open Source as part of the DNA of our company. As to the "flood of S10-related support questions", it isn't always clear to me when a question is Solaris 10 related and when it is related to an OpenSolaris binary distribution. I think Sun and the OpenSolaris.org community have done a poor job in differentiating the "brand" of their corresponding binary distributions. In addition, while there are several distributions based on OpenSolaris today, there is no commercial support available for any of these distributions that I am aware of, other than very limited "developer support" for SXDE. I'll be very transparent and say that Sun is preparing to offer commercial support for the OpenSolaris binary distribution that Project Indiana is creating. That doesn't mean we are trying to turn Project Indiana into a "Sun Product", it simply means we believe that it will result in an OpenSolaris binary distribution that many people will be interesting in purchasing support for. That support will be more than today's limited "developer" support but will have different SLAs. Think Solaris 10 support = Long Term Support and OpenSolaris support = supported for limited time period. There has been a lot of internal discussion as to if we should offer commercial support for the Project Indiana OpenSolaris binary distribution or if we should make our own Sun distribution based on the Project Indiana source code, ala SXDE or SXCE, and only support "our" distribution. That makes absolutely no sense to me. The only thing that would allow Sun to do is name the distribution, because I think everyone would agree that using "the Project Indiana OpenSolaris binary distribution" is not a good name for an OS. So you will see the Project Indiana team start to work with the OpenSolaris community over the coming weeks on naming. There is one obvious name that comes to mind, and that is just to call it OpenSolaris. However, I recognize that the "obviousness" may be a very Sun centric one, so I will repeat, Sun will NOT single-handedly use our trademark ownership to name a community product without the support of the community. Anyhow, apologies for the long email but I've been wanting to start up discussion on some of these topics and welcome your feedback. On Aug 1, 2007, at 5:00 AM, Richard Lowe wrote: > James Carlson <james.d.carlson at Sun.COM> writes: > >> Jim Grisanzio writes: >>> No one is giving us a hard time with saying that S10 is open source >>> because there is 10 million lines of OpenSolaris code to point to >>> under >>> an OSI license. If Sun had been saying that S10 was open source >>> without >>> a a big hairy OpenSolaris to point to and the code was under some >>> non-OSI license, then we'd get slapped big time. >> >> I'll give you a slightly hard time over it: we're seeing the start of >> a flood of S10-related support questions and issues showing up on >> opensolaris.org mailing lists because customers are confused. They >> think S10 == OpenSolaris, and our marketing materials seem to go well >> out of their way to promote this sort of confusion. > > I agree, entirely. > >> When they show up on opensolaris.org, Sun customers get haphazard >> support at best. The people on opensolaris.org (particularly those >> outside of Sun) aren't there to support Sun's commercial products. >> They don't have access to any of the support databases. They don't >> know what patches are available or which ones are needed or how to >> escalate cases or what contracted support levels exist or what >> history >> the customer has had. > > And, beyond that, we don't have the code, which makes any claim of it > being open disingenuous, at best. People can make handwavy > statements as > to substantial similarity all they like, and they'd be true, but > that's > not the same thing. > > We can take varyingly accurate guesses as to what is the same as in > Nevada, and what is substantially similar, but it would never be more > than a guess. > >> Like it or not, our customers see "Sun" as "Sun." It's all one >> thing. >> So, when an answer comes in from an opensolaris.org group, >> particularly if it has a "sun.com" address, it's usually seen as an >> Official Sun Answer. > > I would say that anyone accepting an answer from opensolaris.org, > especially from a person not employed by Sun, treating that as "coming > from Sun" deserves everything they get, personally. > >> This makes a real hash of things. The customers are upset because >> they don't get the support they're expecting and deserve. Our >> support >> group is upset because customers get conflicting answers. Community >> members will be upset because it looks like Sun is dumping the >> customer support burden on them. > > And because we're being asked questions that we can't possibly answer > correctly, but yet are expected to have some kind of answer... > > The balance is between encouraging people who do have support to > contact Sun, without telling everyone (or appearing to tell everyone) > who asks for help to go take a running jump. > >> I think this needs to be detangled somehow. I don't know how to do >> it, but it has to happen if we're going to continue to provide >> commercial support for Solaris. > > A good first step would be getting your marketing organization to stop > deliberately conflating OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, and Nevada to make a > buck. Good luck. > > -- Rich > _______________________________________________ > ogb-discuss mailing list > ogb-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ogb-discuss Marc Hamilton Vice President, Solaris Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: (310)607-2450 http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/attachments/20070801/828fa596/attachment.html>
