take it for what it's worth given that i'm an analyst, rather than a
contributor, but my two cents say the best thing you can do is to
continue reaching out to new communities. the efforts to get DTrace
working with PHP, Python, Ruby et al will do more to evangelize the
product than any personal evangelism efforts, IMO. 

the difficult aspect, from a scale perspective, is that lots of these
types of efforts are needed, both because it's difficult to build
mindshare and because historically the successful partnerships and
cross-pollination efforts are the exception, not the rule. the old
shotgun approach, in essence. 

to the question of whether you're doing the right things, in the right
places, i'd say mostly yes. OS is coming up more frequently, but no
project - Linux included - got its mindshare overnight. the
demonstrations of functionality are quite convincing - to people that
see them - and do illustrate the value that Solaris has. are there
things that could be done better? certainly. 

screencasts might be one angle to consider, and my personal pet peeve -
that lots of the Sun folks have heard from me before - is documentation.
look at the documentation available for Gentoo, for example, and then
look at what's available for OS. documentation, boring as it might be,
is necessary to lowering the barriers to adoption. appealing to the
Solaris knowledgable crowd isn't likely to be an issue for this
community; but appealing to other crowds might be. documentation is one
way of addressing that. 

as far as worrying about what external commentators - myself included -
have to say, i'd worry instead about what other folks in the communities
you might touch (languages, applications or otherwise) have to say.
ultimately, they're the people you need to convince. do that, and
analyst and reporters opinions alike will follow. 

anyways, apologies for the off topic post, but thought it was a subject
worth calling out. and now back to your regularly scheduled
discussions ;)

- sog

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 13:22 -0700, Young Song wrote:
> If you have ideas on what to do to evangelize the community, I'd like to
> know and would be happy to spend time on this. I'm fairly new to
> OpenSolaris.org, and sorry if the information was discussed somewhere
> before. I work in the globalization organization at Sun and posted a
> couple of suggestions on translation and localization testing process in
> the i18n discuss list, but haven't seen a single reply. ;-)
> 
> 
> Young


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