On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 11:12 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote: > Kevin, > > > 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. > > I'm not arguing that we have to work on usability and broadening the > user > base. I'm pointing out that a broad user base does not > *automatically* lead > to having the developers we need for drivers & maitainence & features > & > applications. Just ask the OpenOffice folks; it's quite possible for > us to > have tens of millions of new users and few additional developers.
But that is the issue; millions of users using the free version - if there were millions using the paid for version then Sun would benefit with the ability to hire more programmers and pay for those features. That is why I'm excited about Indiana; an up to date version of Solaris with great hardware support out of the box and paid support available for Sun - I for one would be quite happy to pay my dues if the net result is for the money to then be spent on more features in Solaris. What Sun need to do is get a paid for product out there based on the opensolaris code; an up to date distribution which is comparable to what is out there in the Linux world at a reasonable price - heck, and if its $50 per year like SLED 10 SP1 I'd be a happy chap and many others would be too. > Linux bootstrapped their driver support simply by having hundreds of > developers working on reverse-engineering drivers. It's *still* true > that > the majority of Linux drivers are done by Linux community members and > not by > the hardware companies. But that is due to Linux's arrogance in the driver API department; if they had a stable API/ABI you would have alot more vendors jumping onboard; the simple fact right now, every slight update and interation of the kernel needs a driver recompile - that is completely impractical in this day and age. > So yes, we need to work on usability. We *also* need to continue > working on > making sure that a good proportion of our new users become > contributors or > developers, and not assume that that will happen automagically if we > get more > installations. I'm working on getting New Zealand localisation fixed up and adding support for Maori language. Hopefully once I've got the paper work sorted it won't be like going to hell abd back trying to work it through the bloated bureaucracy that is OpenSolaris PSARC. Matthew _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
