stephen o'grady wrote:
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.
This is true. Although we've gotten a massive amount of press around the
project, I'm still amazed at the number of people who don't know even
the basics of what the OpenSolaris community is doing or stands for.
Also, many people are not even aware of just how much of this we are
doing right out here in the open for all to see. This is a huge
opportunity for us to engage new people.
Although we are opening an already existing product that has a large
installed base of users and ISVs and customers, building a developer
community is a very different model and requires a very different
behavior. I saw this quite clearly when we were building the pilot program.
Gaining mindshare will take time, I agree, and it will have to come
about through the efforts of multiple levels of participants in the
community -- including non-developers. But I'd argue that the best
mechanism for do that is for everyone to use the same open process that
developers use to communicate and run their communities. This, too, will
take time for people to embrace.
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.
I think this argues for a rather direct approach to OpenSolaris
evangelism -- which I agree with considering my history, of course. I'm
not sure all of Sun's marketing and PR teams agree with this, but a
growing number of them are getting quite good at community work. As the
community participates at more conferences around the world, I think
this will improve. Bryan and others have commented on this earlier, and
I think our track record of direct engagement is growing quite nicely.
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
Not off topic at all. Thanks for chiming in on this. Evangelism is part
of community building. We are having a related conversation to this on
the marketing list. Basically what is open source marketing and how to
actually implement it on this project:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=1873
Jim G.
------
Jim Grisanzio, Community Manager, OpenSolaris
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
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