[advocacy-discuss] Community Innovation Awards

[Shawn Walker]

On Dec 12, 2007 11:06 AM, Simon Phipps <webmink at sun.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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 :-)

Indeed, and obviously projects that are truly innovative will likely
be judged correspondingly compared to other projects.

While I agree that good projects should be rewarded, innovative ones
should definitely be the preferred ones for this program (in my view).

-- 
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/

"To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." -
Robert Orben