>complete with some suggestions for the future and what I think >it will take for it to really succeed - mostly time.
Darren, You suggest that it is a 'problem' that contributing to Open Solaris is a contribution to Sun. As a user, that is precisely one of Open Solaris' strengths. And if that means that the sort of person who has a problem with that doesn't contribute, then I'm personally overjoyed. Good riddance. Let them work in their communes. When they grow up and get lives (and significant others, and kids, and all those things that make adults' time precious) and careers that depend on technology they'll start to understand. Its not as if the stuff is hoarded by Sun. Its not as if Red Hat don't benefit from contributions to Linux. You seem keen on students. I doubt anything I wrote as a student or newbie grad would survive any sort of review I'd make now, though. Do you really let interns loose on Solaris internals? >management at Sun needs to step back, to the point where managers, >directors, VPs, etc, should have no involvment with the project >as an employee or agent of Sun If you really want Open Solaris to be 'just another' open source OS, then fine - but what you're saying is that developers matter most, and that sucks. Users should matter most, and developers (particularly on open source projects) are notoriously bad at putting 'mere' users needs first. Management MUST give strong guidence to make sure that Open Solaris remains close to 'Sun Solaris' and that 'Sun Solaris' aligns with users' needs, whether or not that alignment means doing uncool and boring things. Which it will. If Sun loses focus and cannot ratin (and to some extent regain) traction in the datacentre then its lost. Its much more important that it succeed at that than that Open Solaris is a 'successful open source project' - who gives a toss about that? I'm not a Sun shareholder - but I have been using Solaris in trading systems for nearly 20 years and I *do not want* to be at Red Hat's mercy, or to lose the API and system stability that means that the same old ISV products still work - and so do my old applications. Sun are in a stong position - there is good datacentre penetration and the product has a good ISV portfolio. It needs desktop 'wow' factor but Sun can also put clean air between itself and the Linux hordes by embracing the very things they reject as not being 'open' enough (like I care as a user!) and being a third power with Microsoft and Apple. I can't for the life of me see why anyone would want to be 'me too' and more like Linux, geek cool or not. But I can see how *users* wanting an alternative to Windows would choose a system that has first class support of every feature of their nVidia and ATI motherboard and GPUs, a vendor provided office suite, and vendor provided development tools. And PostgreSQL. Mr Gumpy -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.8/716 - Release Date: 09/03/2007 18:53 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
