James Carlson <james.d.carlson at Sun.COM> writes: > 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.
I agree, entirely. > 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. And, beyond that, we don't have the code, which makes any claim of it being open disingenuous, at best. People can make handwavy statements as to substantial similarity all they like, and they'd be true, but that's not the same thing. We can take varyingly accurate guesses as to what is the same as in Nevada, and what is substantially similar, but it would never be more than a guess. > 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. I would say that anyone accepting an answer from opensolaris.org, especially from a person not employed by Sun, treating that as "coming from Sun" deserves everything they get, personally. > 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. And because we're being asked questions that we can't possibly answer correctly, but yet are expected to have some kind of answer... The balance is between encouraging people who do have support to contact Sun, without telling everyone (or appearing to tell everyone) who asks for help to go take a running jump. > 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. A good first step would be getting your marketing organization to stop deliberately conflating OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, and Nevada to make a buck. Good luck. -- Rich
