Oh, I think there are massive community building opportunities in South America. Whenever anyone goes to Brazil, for example, they seem to be extremely impressed. I don't know much about the region myself, but just observing the Java community there gives me great hope. I see that Jonathan was there recently and met up with the OpenSolaris user group http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan?entry=brazil, and Steve Lau was there recently for FISL. Perhaps I'll get to visit some day, too. :)
The only sun related ad i saw in my university (www.fi.uba.ar) was about java and was at least a year old, no sign of solaris or opensolaris ads whatsoever not to mention talks about it. Argentina was not even included in the Solaris University Challenge. Networking courses are thought using Slackware because "it's the most unix like linux"; I feel sick every time I hear that and not because i hate slackware, I have been a Slackware user for years and still lurk in Slackware related irc channels but because Solaris is just as cheap and just as open.
This thread started out with Sun losing a customer. Ok, that's fair. We win, we lose. But a lot of the conversation has focused on Linux or IBM or the fact that Sun messed up. Ok, fair enough, I suppose. But a lot of that is history, and some things *are* starting to go our way now. Personally, IBM and Linux impress the hell out of me. I've been the recipient of some of IBM's market moves on multiple programs (before OpenSolaris), and those guys are more than a challenge to handle. How can I not respect such execution? And my respect for Linux only grows as I experience the challenges of working in a community environment and trying to help build a community while living inside a large corporation. Not to mention all the engineering challenges (most of which I miss) of actually opening all this stuff under a pretty large spotlight. The Linux guys have built a successful global community, and I think we can learn a great deal from them.
yeah, IBM is amazing, it is thought of as an opensource company and has not opensourced anything. I agree, we can learn a lot about the linux community in terms of community that is
I also don't think there's a need to criticize Sun's competitors (leave that to the Sun execs ... that's what they get paid for :)) because I just think it's a distraction from our own operations. For OpenSolaris (and Sun's Solaris product) to be competitive, the focus needs to be on community building -- which is what I tell everyone inside Sun, by the way. Look ... we're supposed to be dead, remember? We were poked fun of, our very existence was denied, and most observers sitting on the sidelines predicted our failure not very long ago. How times have changed. The OpenSolaris community proved them *all* wrong.
you shouldnt need to criticize anyone when you have the best product in the market but you shouldnt stand still either, Sun has the best software stack out there and some really good hardware to add to the mix, it was about time they started act like it. This is not about using Sun's products because they are cheaper and better, it is about them making my life easier also
Joerg and Thomas are correct to point out the university issue, but things will turn around. Inside Sun, this is being taken seriously. In fact, education is an area of specific focus on our team via Teresa and Patrick. I think they've done a really good job this year, and I was just trying to reflect that in pointing to Joey's blog. Teresa recently gave me an OpenSolaris curriculum (a really big book) that they are using at some of the universities in China because I was going to give a talk to a group of Chinese execs at Sun's customer briefing center. It turned heads, believe me. At that moment, it hit me ... they are *teaching* OpenSolaris now. We've been open for just one year, and people are *teaching* our stuff.
i already commented about this, it was my reality here
Sun is not always the only answer here in terms of competing with IBM or HP or whoever or going back to the universities or whatever market. Without the community -- us -- Sun wouldn't be able to do nearly as much with Solaris as it can now. The product needs the community and the community needs the product. It's one story now.
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