Jim Grisanzio writes: > No one is giving us a hard time with saying that S10 is open source > because there is 10 million lines of OpenSolaris code to point to under > an OSI license. If Sun had been saying that S10 was open source without > a a big hairy OpenSolaris to point to and the code was under some > non-OSI license, then we'd get slapped big time.
I'll give you a slightly hard time over it: we're seeing the start of a flood of S10-related support questions and issues showing up on opensolaris.org mailing lists because customers are confused. They think S10 == OpenSolaris, and our marketing materials seem to go well out of their way to promote this sort of confusion. When they show up on opensolaris.org, Sun customers get haphazard support at best. The people on opensolaris.org (particularly those outside of Sun) aren't there to support Sun's commercial products. They don't have access to any of the support databases. They don't know what patches are available or which ones are needed or how to escalate cases or what contracted support levels exist or what history the customer has had. Like it or not, our customers see "Sun" as "Sun." It's all one thing. So, when an answer comes in from an opensolaris.org group, particularly if it has a "sun.com" address, it's usually seen as an Official Sun Answer. This makes a real hash of things. The customers are upset because they don't get the support they're expecting and deserve. Our support group is upset because customers get conflicting answers. Community members will be upset because it looks like Sun is dumping the customer support burden on them. I think this needs to be detangled somehow. I don't know how to do it, but it has to happen if we're going to continue to provide commercial support for Solaris. > Yah, I agree. Also, many people are just as confused by what "Linux" is > so why should we feel we need to perfectly package OpenSolaris in a nice > neat box. That's not possible. There are Linux distros. There is > kernel.org. There are binaries. There is source. There are sites all > over the place. The community is global and lives in /no/ single > location. It's such a mess. And yet, it's wildly successful. > > OpenSolaris is source code. You build things from it. No big deal .... <evil> We could insist that everyone use OpenSolaris only as an adjective and never as a noun. It's worked so well in other contexts. </evil> ;-} -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
