[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris Branding Guidelines - an alternate proposal

[S h i v]

On 10/20/07, Simon Phipps <webmink at sun.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 19, 2007, at 20:51, S h i v wrote:
>
> > OpenSolaris till now is more closer to Linux(kernel) than
> > Ubuntu(distro) by explicit definition in the FAQs and all the
> > clarifications made in these 2years of existance.
>
> Except it isn't. The breadth of the overall OpenSolaris project,
> and the insignificance of the traffic concerning ON proportional to all
> the rest of the traffic, shows that whatever the words may say, the
> actions demonstrate that OpenSolaris is a peer of Ubuntu, OpenBSD,
> Fedora (etc) rather than of kernel.org. We first need to own up to
> that reality.
>

The overall OpenSolaris project refers to opensolaris.org and the
projects hosted here. This again has nothing to do with a distro.
Attempt to make OpenSolaris==Distro is a current effort.
Rest of the points takes this as a given (which is quite not the case)
and uses that as the starting point of discussion.

> It is then likely to be clear that the path forward for us as a
> community is to be have a baseline operating system (ON, package
> manager, installer, base packages) and then have full distros that
> build on that base and give it personality.

Indiana is with flesh, blood, personality and is an end distro ! No?
Any other distros from this point on *is Indiana* with a changed
background/lesser/additional packages effectively killing every other
distro that comes from ground up.

>
> That baseline is what should then carry the name "OpenSolaris" in
> some form. For deployers and end-users, OpenSolaris will come to
> indicate a place that key values - scalability, performance,
> manageability, observability, binary compatibility - are sure to be
> present. We'll want distros that express those values to be able to
> associate themselves with OpenSolaris.
>

These are attributes of Sun's current Solaris operating system !
An OpenSolaris distro that a person creates as a rescue CD, or a demo
LiveCD, or a distro for a audio/video studio, or a educational OS for
schools, or a gaming system, or an appliance.........have their own
set of attributes that aren't necessarily the same as above.

>
> Indeed, the community members who work for Sun
> on such things will probably only be free to embrace and enforce it
> once it has these attributes, for important legal reasons.
>

This is an interesting point. One of the first things that the new
branding guidelines initiative that is being floated should get
clarification for is
*) What rights/freedom are available to the community to use the TM.
This cannot be arrived at through consenus, this has to be told by the
TM holder(Sun) in black & white.
*) The guidelines should then be framed within the boundaries of the
rights given to the community.

regards
Shiv