Brandorr, > I tend to agree with those who feel that it is probably a bit > premature to call Indiana "The OpenSolaris distro", without some sort > of transparent decision happening within the community. (Or at the > very least an acknowledgment by the governing board that this isn't a > decision the community has the power to make).
I think that we need to go beyond this and send a resolution to the Sun management involved that naming Indiana that way, even if it's Sun's corporate perogative, would set back the OpenSolaris project's community building by a year or more. For the last year, we've pointed to Bellinix, Nexenta, etc. as proof that Opensolaris is a real OSS project despite being 90% Sun staff. If we start promoting Indiana as "the" OpenSolaris distro we'll be admitting that the critics from Red Hat and IBM were right; the OpenSolaris project was never anything more than a blind for Sun-Solaris. I don't think the other distros will "go away", or integrate into Indiana if we do that. I think they will die, and their users will go to Linux, and not come back to Solaris, ever. In fact, some of them will likely become anti-Solaris crusaders, blogging about our every mistake. I've seen this before with other OSS projects which made bad governance decisions. Heck, I'm sure some of you remember Solaris 9 x86 project? How it was promised, then distributed free but unsupported, then withdrawn? At the time that happened, probably 8-9% of the PostgreSQL community was on Solaris, and many of them got involved with the project ... and afterwards, many of them quit using Solaris and Sun products, and those PostgreSQL/Solaris users never came back to using Solaris. At this point, the PostgreSQL community is less than 5% Solaris, and a lot of the drop can be attributed to Sun's going back in its promises to them. If we turn our backs on BelleniX and Nexenta and Schillix in order to make Indiana the exclusive OpenSolaris distribution, get ready to see enrollment in the OpenSolaris community drop by 50%. When Ian's team launches the packaging system for Indiana, I think the tech will be compelling enough to make most of the other distributions adopt it anyway. That's the good way to go, which keeps us building community. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Lead Sun Microsystems San Francisco 01-415-752-2500
