Actually, I see them as two very different groups. The difference is primarily the entry point.
Agreed. (Don't ignore the fact that goals and workloads are currently very different.)
The current market for Solaris 10 (and the market RHEL etc. also target) is the traditional enterprise, i.e., top-down, pilot-it-for-a-while- before-making-any-decisions model. The market that prefers Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. is much more bottom-up--decisions are much less methodical and are often made by developers in the trenches to solve short term problems much more quickly than is possible in the top-down model. Here, the developers are much more likely to reach for what's available to them and what they know--which is often Fedora rather than RHEL, etc. The latter market is what we should be targeting with OpenSolaris--can we
While I agree that this is the proper market for *Sun* to be targeting from a business sense. (From a growth, innovation and dollar spend point of view). I don't think one distro can be all things to all people. Many of the people you are trying to convince to go with a facile distro, have experience rooted in the Enterprise market. I think OpenSolaris, needs to facilitate the needs of both groups. Whether we do that through two distros, or some other way, you are going to find it exceedingly difficult to find consensus around one Linux style distro. (Unless there is a liberal application of top down management, risking alienation of the tiny but outspoken minority of community members, that are fundamentalists). Remember one thing. If a sysadmin or OS developer is a strong Linux advocate, chances are they wouldn't be here. ;)
make OpenSolaris the OS those developers will reach for? In terms of Fedora/RHEL analogies, Solaris will certainly benefit from the QA/testing advantages of having an open source platform, because OpenSolaris ultimately feeds into it much as Fedora feeds into RHEL. But how do we capture the network effect value? Fedora has no network effect value for RH--where's the upgrade path to RHEL, or the big company to call when you need support? This is where can do better with OpenSolaris..
I am starting to think that you want OpenSolaris.dist to mirror Solaris.dist, and just have OpenSolaris.dist to have a 12 month lead on Solaris.dist. (I personally am looking for a bit more differentiation, I think the Enterpise OpenSolaris dist needs to be held to a higher standard of backwards compatibility, whereas with the community edition this won't really be as much of an issue, as we are targeting a mostly new user base).
I can already hear it: "Oh, that's just WRONG! You should NEVER put an UNSUPPORTED OS in production!" Perhaps. But that's the way the world has evolved.. Also note that it's not actually a new phenomenon--this is same dynamic that got the PC and Linux where they are today. No CIO in the world said, "I've gotta get me some Linux!", or at least in the late 1990s when Linux was taking off. He woke up one day and realized Linux was already everywhere. Do you fight the trend or figure out how to take advantage of it? The answer seems perfectly logical to me.
Ian, you aren't gonna win this one by trying to convince everyone here that the Linux way is "the" way. Don't talk about it till you are blue in the face, as there are certain people you will never convince.. I suggest doing an end around, and just make it happen. Gather together a few like minded devs, and just do it. Let the number of downloads of this new distro speak for themselves. (One way or another). I have experience on both sides of the fence, and support your efforts.I hope you are still techie enough to ignore the politics and get this going. -brian p.s. - Please let me know offline, if there is anything I can do to help. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
