There has been lots of discussion this week in the press and on this
forum about Project Indiana. As I said in my blog last Sunday, albeit
somewhat buried in a long entry, Sun is not making any big Solaris
related announcements this week at JavaOne. What Ian did do this
week, during the CommunityOne event, is talk about a concept we are
calling Project Indiana. CommunityOne was intended as a face-to-face
event for participation, contribution, and innovation and Ian and I
thought this was a good place to introduce the Project Indiana
concept. As some of you might agree, face-to-face forums are
sometimes better to discuss new concepts than via email. Then you can
call someone a dude without implying they work on a farm.
CommunityOne was also an open event and quite a few press were
present and wrote followup articles on Project Indiana. Since
CommunityOne, both Ian and myself have been busy taking advantage of
having 15,000 developers in one place to talk to as many people as we
can, face-to-face, and haven't had time to discuss Project Indiana on
this forum, but I am sure you will be hearing more about Project
Indiana here in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, let me clear up some
misconceptions and make a few observations:
- Project Indiana is the name Ian and I are using to refer to some of
our high level goals and strategy for Solaris. There is nothing
radically new about Project Indiana. It is a collection of things
that are either already being worked on by Solaris engineering and/or
the OpenSolaris community or have been widely discussed and
generally recognized as things we needed to do with Solaris including
making it more familiar to a wider community (yes, including the
Linux community) and making it easier to install.
- Sun is not co-opting the OpenSolaris community. In fact, I am
adding several new staff members to Solaris marketing who's full time
job will be to ensure we work through and with the community. When we
are ready to actually start on what we are referring to as Project
Indiana we plan to do so through the OpenSolaris community process,
adhering to the existing community governance model. If it is
appropriate to start a new OpenSolaris community to implement the
concepts in Project Indiana, we will do so following the published
community creation process, and there is no expectation that any new
community will be called Indiana.
- Sun is not anti-Linux, and Sun is not against the Linux community.
Sun competes in the commercial operating systems market against
multiple companies that distribute Linux operating systems. The two
are not inconsistent. Some of the first non SunOS work done by Sun
was helping port NFS to non SunOS operating systems distributed by
companies that we competed against.
-For the record, I use csh, not sh, bash, tcsh, etc. There are no
plans to make csh the default Solaris shell. I still love Solaris!
I'm sorry some of you were upset to hear about Project Indiana in the
press. The dates for CommunityOne were set long before Ian or I
started working on the Solaris team and it was a chance to talk about
our ideas that we didn't want to pass up. I'm not sorry that the
Solaris community received a lot of press this week. I think more
people every day are taking another look at Solaris, and that is good
for all of us.
Marc Hamilton
Vice President, Solaris Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Phone: (310)607-2450
http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton
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