On Tue, 15 May 2007, Ian Murdock wrote:
Why not? Isn't OpenSolaris a "product" that has a "market", and don't we
need to make sure we're addressing the right market? In my experience,
the most successful open source projects are the ones that are managed like
products (GNOME, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). The ones that lose their way
(Debian ahem) are the ones that just sort of evolve without much of a plan.
Fundamentally, Sun seems to look at OpenSolaris as a product, and I think
there's fault in that vision. In your example, I would site that Fedora
and Ubuntu are different to me. Why? Because Fedora is supposed to be the
open and free version of Red Hat. Do you think Red Hat markets Fredora as
a product for ROI as a business? IOW, is media sales considered an actual
revenue? They used to look at Red Hat Linux as a revenue in regard to
selling media, as they do RHES now, AFAIK. But do you think Red Hat
expanded to open up more potential revenues? I'm just curious how you look
at that.
One problem I have is that whenever corporate gets their minds around
products, they start to associate revenue streams with them. OpenSolaris
should not be thought of in that regard, and more to the point, Sun should
focus their marketing and revenue streams around Solaris which is their
product. This is similar to the relation between RHES and Fedora for Red
Hat, and I see Ubuntu being much different than Fedora in that regard,
isn't Ubuntu a business/company?
I am very confused about some of the recent events in regards to
OpenSolaris, including your involvment, and not sure how marketing and
engineering co-exist in the free world to be honest. There is apparently
some rough edges in that relationship, as evident by reaction to said
recent events. I will say that any live blooded programmer is welcome to
the community, can you still code? <gd&r> I mean no disrespect, but if we
could get marketing to fund reqs for spots in the OpenSolaris community, I
think we should leverage that more at Sun. Please make it a requirement
that they can code though...;-)
From my view, Sun hasn't invested the proper resource into marketing their
own Solaris, and now they want to market OpenSolaris? Some of the folks
involved with Sun Corporate Marketing were some of the some folks that
made some of the excellent decisions for the company, like back on Feb. 8,
2002. I'll refrain from comment...:-/
--
Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
(this message written under the guidance of Yo-Yo Ma.<g>)
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