Eric Boutilier wrote: > On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, John Plocher wrote: >> I had a long "chat" with several Sun VP/Director types after the latest >> Solaris' All Hands meeting about OpenSolaris. My biggest take-away >> was: >> >> ************************************************************ >> We need an operational definition for the term "OpenSolaris" >> ************************************************************ > > I believe that the perception of the word "OpenSolaris" in the broader > IT world (including the media) is, and will be, overwhelmingly one > thing: OpenSolaris is an operating system.
You are correct. And why did this happen? Because the OpenSolaris project succeeded massively and that evidence is pervasive and global. Originally, we named OpenSolaris to leverage the Solaris brand. Some say this was a mistake, but they are turning out to be totally wrong. The strategy was solid and well thought out. What happened was that over time market loved what we were doing so much it just started using "OpenSolaris" to refer to all things Solaris. Heck, I was blogging using "OpenSolaris" way before we formally chose the name. Many of us were. Also, the market /wanted/ to use the term to describe what we were doing with everything around Solaris! That's very cool. That demonstrates success. Accuracy tends to go out the window at that point, but people are now talking about you without you having to prod them. And we think we have a problem? I fail to see how any of this needs fixing. It's not necessarily complete, but it ain't broken. Also, along the way, Sun started referring to all things Solaris as "OpenSolaris" and even now we officially say that Solaris 10 is open source: "The free and open source Solaris Operating System" is right on our own website: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ Now, S10 is not open source, of course, but I agree with the basic positioning because some markets require systems to be open source (some governments, etc) and these issues of what is and is not open can be clarified in face to face meetings during sales, conversations, implementation, etc. Heck, the Japanese government is implementing Solaris systems right now (articles in Nikei today) as part of their e-gov initiative due to specs requiring open source. This is the second implemention, by the way. 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. > This basically became a fait > accompli when that name was picked because "OpenSolaris" is a modified > version of "Solaris", and Solaris is an operating system. So I think > there's nothing we can do about that perception any more than we could > try to get the world to think bottled water was not a type of water. I > will say that sometimes "OpenSolaris" also gets used in a project > context. But that's easy and natural because unlike Solaris, > OpenSolaris is developed as open-source, which is clearly conveyed by > the first part of the word. And that usage is cool too because when > there are only two contexts in use, the meaning is easy to keep straight. > > Bottom line. It's *so* not a problem. Yes. We are all making too much of this. But branding is a nebulous thing, and we have the wonderful experience of witnessing the creation of a new brand that is actually resonating in a market that damn near rejected us. And Sun did very little formal marketing around the OpenSolaris brand. It was tied to Solaris (which Sun does spend a great deal marketing) and it took off and now we have all these "problems." Ha. Good problems to have. > We just need to burn all the > slideware and web pages that say stuff like: "Definition of > OpenSolaris: A code base, and the community around it" and other vexing > things (to the broader public), and accept that the word means... well, > what it means. Yah, I agree. Also, many people are just as confused by what "Linux" is so why should we feel we need to perfectly package OpenSolaris in a nice neat box. That's not possible. There are Linux distros. There is kernel.org. There are binaries. There is source. There are sites all over the place. The community is global and lives in /no/ single location. It's such a mess. And yet, it's wildly successful. OpenSolaris is source code. You build things from it. No big deal .... Jim -- Jim Grisanzio http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
