Joseph, I have made an effort to incorporate your comments into a new list.
Primary Drivers: ---------------------- 1) There is a desire for a minimal/core OpenSolaris distro, that other distro packagers can leverage to create their own distros. Building a distro from this core *may*, in the future, allow other distros to also be hosted at OpenSolaris.org. This OS core must, for the sake of practicality, allow layers to be added on top to get to Nevada. 2) Currently their is no Open development platform. The only allowed development platform is, a closed source, proprietary platform: Sun Solaris (Express). Ideally guardianship for this development platform should be moved into the community. (Yes this seems in opposition to bullet #1, but keep reading) This is a "Free Speech" issue, which not everyone cares about, but it is an important facet of the open source movement. (After all it's not FreeSolaris.org). In addition by not prioritizing this the status quo is likely to continue for some time. (IE: Why fix "what isn't broken"? We need to put out a slightly impaired totally open source distro. If the missing closed source functionality turns out to be important, open source replacements are going to be made. 3) Current HW requirements are a bit on the high end. I can't run this on an old 386, or for that matter on an old P/PII I have lying around. And the thought is that Sun wouldn't include such projects in it's Solaris distribution, for ecconomic and support reasons. Ideally Solaris should be able to run on a 386 w/ 4MB of RAM (High end I know) Realistically let's call the target i486DX, 8MB RAM, and 200MB HD. The community can determine the supported hardware list. 4) Sun (Ian/Indiana/Others) wants a second Solaris distro that will be the Fedora to Sun's RHEL (Solaris). They wish to do this and still leave a clear migration path from one distro to another. (Unlike Fedora). Although this may be considered a commercial driver outside of the community, let's keep in mind who makes the community possible. I as a member of the community want to see our host prosper, and continue to be able to provide support to our community. (If this was a Linux vendor launching a new community distro, there wouldn't be nearly as much opposition) Existing OpenSOlaris efforts that OSH must incorporate: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1) Currently the barrier of entry to getting involved with OpenSolaris is high, both from a conceptual point of view, as well as a work required point of view. (I can't just download a ISO and install an up to date dev platform) OpenSolaris needs a quicker and simpler distribution method. (Which allows free mirroring ISOs, and binary and source packages, without lengthy legal reviews. This ties into the desire to have a completely unencumbered base distro set) 2) Currently the barrier to entry for immigrants is high. Driver support, that shall we say "does not lead the field". Installation and configuration can be confusing to those that have not studied Solaris. I think these are generally acknowledged as goals in the community, but this is where we have a distro that focuses on this issue specifically. (This is why there needs to be an optional method for leveraging closed source bits. Those bits would not be part of the base distro, but a method to leverage them would be included 3) Currently there isn't a standard interface/method for non-Sun distros to provide optional non open source bits as part of the build/install process. Most likely this is a legal and technical issue. (Part of the packaging and installation efforts currently ongoing) -Brian
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