James Mansion wrote:
Guys,
It really pains me to see the sort of finger pointing going on here
about the various existing distributions and 'Indiana', and in
particular I'm concerned at the prospect of alienation between Joerg
and 'the rest' because - as an outsider - I do perceive that he did a
lot, when Open Solaris was very young.
I can understand that when one works on something for a long time,
then to decide that its been eclipsed by others that came after can be
hard.
But I'd like to ask: *why* do you - all - maintain different
distributions?
I started this work for personal reasons initially - learning
opportunity, opportunity to do
something that has a high impact, scratch an itch, excitement and
sense of achievement to
be able to hack up a bootable UNIX from a CD where there are no tools
for the job. Any
college student can do it for Linux in a day as there are well
developed mature tools, but
for OpenSolaris it is a different story.
I was also getting more and more ideas to make OpenSolaris more
usable and
approachable to people and this is an excellent testbed to try out
such stuff. I find it
easiest to try these when I am not having to justify my every move to
someone else.
Make mistakes and learn from them.
But as I progressed, I realized another point - culturally this had
the potential to generate
interest and even excitement locally in Bangalore/India and get
people to look at
OpenSolaris and even start coding. The potential being amplified by
the fact that this
work is being done on their home turf. Bring down barriers to
participation. And over
time we have observed this to actually happen in practice and is
continuing. BeleniX
is continuing to enthuse and attract people and is becoming an
expression of identity
for some of us.
Also we have been conscious of being open and sharing. That is why we
have detailed
technical docs and source code to all the innovations easily
accessible right from the
beginning. We do not want BeleniX to be a black box. Others have
already picked up
some of the stuff and tilized them.
Yes maintaining a distro is a *lot* of work, but now it is a passion,
an identity, a
part of life, a way to innovate, and in fact a growing community -
something that
brings people together.
Regards,
Moinak.
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