I just got off the phone with Jim Grisanzio, THE OpenSolaris evangelist, see http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/ Jim was sharing his experience on how to grow communities on OpenSolaris. In Jim's opinion engaging universities and attending open source conferences are one of the best venues for that. One thing that is key for attracting people is to actively call out projects that people can work on. I have to admit, in the past we haven't been very good at calling out what kind of contributions we are specifically looking for. I'd suggest that we prepare a list of things that we'd like to see from the community to provide guidance to people interested in contributing. Some of the things that come to my mind are a basic GUI (Someone in my team already did a first pass at this, but I'm sure there is a lot more that can be added to it) as well as contributing bug fixes. In addition to that Crossbow makes the HW classification capabilities of Network Interfaces transparent. This allows people to build more effective fire walls and IDS systems by pushing filtering and classification of packets down into the NIC HW.
There are probably thousands of other ways for people in the community to contribute: Documentation of typical use cases, best practices for managing virtual NICs, creating demos etc. Any other ideas? Markus --- Markus Flierl Manager, Solaris Core OS 17 Network Circle Menlo Park, CA 94025 phone: 650-786-2056 http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/markusflierl
