On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 09:12:46AM -0700, John Plocher wrote: > And I think that this is the thing that "Indiana" is seeking to change. > Many of us see it as a flaw that the opensolaris.org meta-community does > not have a reference distro that *is* more equal than the others.
Can you elaborate on the reasoning behind your conclusion that his weakens the OpenSolaris Community? I disagree with the conclusion, but I do not understand how it was reached. > This is the difference between simply wanting to be a technology source > (think of Xorg) versus wanting to solve real customer problems (think > KDE, GNOME and Apple). An OpenSolaris reference distro that is built > by the people who have already pioneered OpenSolaris based distros, that > pulls together all the best of what we have learned, that forces us to > improve the things that still suck at, and that gives us all a concrete > focus for our efforts - how can that be a bad thing? > > I don't know about you, but I certainly would rather be an Apple instead > of an Xorg... But KDE and GNOME are components, too. They provide technologies that companies like Red Hat and Sun can use to meet customer needs. They're the same as Xorg in the regard, really. Sun and Apple are the peers here; they're the ones focused on meeting customer needs. In turn, they can and do influence the direction taken by the component providers by hiring people to interact with the respective communities and make contributions. Would I rather be Apple or Xorg? That seems like a matter of personal preference; both have value. I share your interest in meeting customer needs, and would lean in the same direction. That's why I enjoy working for Sun and helping Sun make products that our customers need and want. The incentives are different, too - Sun pays us to do this stuff, and whether and how much we're paid depends on how well we as a company meet our customers' needs. Other members of the OpenSolaris Community who share our interest are welcome to apply for employment at Sun or another vendor, or to form their own companies to do that. But it's folly to pretend that a community with diverse and perhaps conflicting interests, receiving compensation from many different sources (ranging from various employers to meeting one's own needs to a simple desire to learn and explore) should imagine for itself a single untapped market and become focused on that market's needs as if it were a corporation hawking a product. Let's call Indiana what it is: an attempt by Sun to make a second product, a peer of Solaris. That's all well and good. Saying that the OpenSolaris Community will become the product team (and that OpenSolaris will be in effect co-opted by the new Sun product at the expense of its technology component status) is not. And, speaking strictly as a Sun partisan here, I fail to understand why the vast majority of problems the product team is considering cannot be solved either in OpenSolaris as a component or in Solaris as it exists today. To the extent that Sun succeeds in reaching new customers with its new product, we (as employees) ought to call it a success. To the extent that our choice to direct our own resources toward solving these problems in a way that does not benefit our existing customers drives away those existing customers, we ought to call it a failure. It's too early to know which will dominate, but why should we expect or insist that the other members of the community join us in making this bet, in many cases at the expense of their own interests? -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
