[advocacy-discuss] Community Innovation Awards

[Simon Phipps]

On Dec 12, 2007, at 09:01, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> These are of course absolutely critical areas to the success of  
> OpenSolaris,
> but they generally aren't sources of "Innovation".   I could see  
> some work
> there being innovative - creating a new driver framework like Nemo,  
> the IPS
> work, or defining a new way to get documentation to users - but  
> just writing
> a driver for a given device, porting/packaging an existing  
> application, or
> writing documentation aren't breaking new ground.
>
> That's what confused me when the awards program I'd heard about  
> internally was
> announced with the "Innovation Awards" title - the biggest  
> contributions we've
> gotten from community members that aren't employed by a sponsor  
> like Sun or
> Intel have been in areas like this (ksh93, the Emancipation  
> projects, Xorg
> SPARC drivers), that have been focused on bringing OpenSolaris up  
> to parity
> with either the existing closed bits of Solaris or other open source
> platforms, not in taking OpenSolaris to places no one has ever gone  
> before.

I'd not get too hung up on the naming for the scheme from Sun. We're  
given the award so that we can reward contribution that is of value  
to our community, that's the guiding principle. Having said that,  
encoyraging innovative contribution is no bad thing :-)

S.