When Project Indiana was first conceived, it was envisioned to be a community distribution of OpenSolaris--in other words, built by the community and called OpenSolaris [1]. My basic observation, as someone who came into the OpenSolaris community from the outside - even perhaps from the competition - and who represents the target market this community needs to reach was this: That the packaging and presentation of OpenSolaris as it stands today represents a barrier to adoption and, thus, an obstacle to growing the OpenSolaris community and bringing in new users. To lower these barriers, OpenSolaris needs to be more than just the code base. It needs to be a binary that users can easily download and install to get easy access to OpenSolaris technology. Put another way, as I said in a blog post in June, we need to have a better answer to the question, “Where do I download OpenSolaris?” [2].
[1] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss/2007-May/028871.html [2] http://ianmurdock.com/2007/06/08/where-do-i-download-opensolaris/ Since that time, there has been much debate about what the Project Indiana distribution should be called. Over the past few weeks, the conversation on the lists has centered around the OpenSolaris trademark, and whether or not Indiana, or any other distribution, should have the right/privilege to carry the moniker "OpenSolaris". I believe the debate fundamentally comes down to a question of identity: Is OpenSolaris a code base that others (including Sun) use as the basis for their operating environments, or is OpenSolaris an operating environment in its own right? Given that much of the world already assumes OpenSolaris is an operating environment - namely the community version of Solaris - one answer to that question is clear to me: OpenSolaris MUST be something new users can download and install. Indiana is the first, and so far only, distribution created on OpenSolaris.org containing only bits from other OpenSolaris projects. It is, in a sense, a delivery vehicle for their work. For all intents and purposes Indiana is OpenSolaris in binary form. For all of the discussion that has gone on around the name, very few people seem to disagree with this. So, in a few days, the OpenSolaris community's Indiana project will be releasing their first developer preview, and those bits will carry the name "OpenSolaris Developer Preview". This will no doubt be a controversial decision in some circles, but in my view, it is imperative for our community to grow and prosper. Does that mean OpenSolaris can't also be a code base that others use as the basis for their own distros? Of course they can still use it. But a core value of Solaris has always been compatibility, so we (Sun), as the steward of the OpenSolaris trademark, have hesitated to allow other distros to use the OpenSolaris brand to identify themselves. With a binary that defines what it means to be "OpenSolaris" from an application compatibility point of view, we now have the opportunity to do just this. Let's continue working together as a community to develop a set of branding guidelines so that other distributions may also use the OpenSolaris brand, provided certain conditions related to compatibility and quality are met. The first step to a branding program is to define the OpenSolaris binary core, and I invite the community to help define it, using the Indiana bits as a first approximation, with the understanding that it is OK to make mistakes, leaps of faith and simplifying assumptions as we figure this all out. This discussion has already begun and some very productive collaboration is already occurring--many thanks to John Plocher for getting it started. Once the core is defined, the second step is to build a branding program around it that will enable other distributions that use the core to identify themselves as OpenSolaris derived distributions. As Sara has already mentioned, we have been socializing this idea inside Sun for some time, and we now have sufficient buy in that we are ready to bring the topic up to community discussion. Again, I have no doubt this will be controversial. However, it is the right thing to do for the community and, yes, for Sun too. The key challenge the OpenSolaris community faces in the coming months and years is to grow and attract more users, and having a simple, tangible thing called OpenSolaris that bundles together what we're doing as a community in an easily digestible form is a vital part of being able to do that. And again, just because there is a need for OpenSolaris to be an complete operating environment, it does not mean there isn't value in seeing other operating environments derived from the OpenSolaris code base (i.e., multiple distributions). Existing distributions can continue as they have before, and distributions that wish to carry the OpenSolaris brand will now have a path to doing so as well. Followups set to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -ian -- Ian Murdock http://ianmurdock.com/ "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
