On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 09:29 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote: > Korey, all, > > > Imagine with me that Solaris was the OS on 40% of all computers. Do > you > > believe that it would have a large and vibrant developer community? > Most > > certainly. Developers would miss out on 40% of the market if they > ignored > > Solaris. Getting Solaris installed on as many computers as possible > should > > be the first and main concern. > > I realize I'm jumping into this thread quite late (I plead travel), > but I have > to comment. The above is not strictly true; it's quite possible to > have a > very large user community and a tiny developer community if you are > facing > conversion barriers or mishandle your community growth. For > example, > MySQL's user base is 3x to 5x the size of PostgreSQL's, but becuase > MySQL has > significant company vs. community dichotomy issues PostgreSQL's > developer > base is equal sized if not larger. OpenOffice.org has a *huge* > adoption base > (50 million +) but because its user base don't tend to be > developer-types, > and there have been divisive politics in the past, the project still > struggles to get enough contributors. > > So while I agree that we need to focus on increasing the user base of > Opensolaris, we cannot afford to lose site of the fact that the > conversion > process of user-to-developer *must* be carefully managed at every > stage. > Mishandling or divisive politics at any step can leave us with a huge > base of > users who don't contribute and getting left behind on OS development > by > Linux. > > Also, I don't personally believe that Opensolaris could achieve 40% > server > market share without first having many contributors and champions > outside of > Sun. So the cultivation of a user base and the culivation of a > contributor > base need to go hand-in-hand, and we can't lose track of either.
But most of Solaris's main problems are hardware support related to; if you can really push the user adoption rate up, it is then possible for the community to use that user base size as leverage to demand better hardware support from vendors. Thats ultimately the underlying issue; then once more hardware is supported, there will be more users. Third party software companies will jump on and create software for the Solaris desktop/workstation market, people will purchase more Solaris licences and workstations, Sun creates more profits, Johnny has a big smile - and the world keep spinning. Ultimately, it all comes back to user base. How can Sun foster it? how about making Windows transition easier - get *one* (just one) programmer to get wine working out of the box with Solaris, and work with the wine community of improved compatibility. If it means that I can go off, download the latest source, ./configure && gmake depend && gmake, you'll make a lot of people happy - especially those who like using Photoshop (no, GIMP truly does suck) and wine would enable that to happen. Get things merged pronto. OpenSound needs to be merged. If SADA didn't suck so much, it wouldn't be an issue, but it truly sucks, recording doesn't work, sound doesn't work all the time, controls stop working on occasion, the ossxmix is more confusing than a Chinese takeway menu. Matthew _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
