[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris (TM)

[Brandorr]

OpenSolaris is an interesting trademark. The word Open has been
combined with the trademark Solaris, resulting in a new wordmark.
Ostensibly Open refers to Open Source, and open, as in "in view of
all" IE: "an open development process".

Today, for a number of reasons, Sun's OpenSolaris trademark has proven
to be more popular than Sun's Solaris trademark. Most likely because
people are attracted to the principles embodied in the name. But also
because Sun executives like to talk about OpenSolaris. For me, I was
initially attracted, because I thought it was a way to influence
Solaris development, and more specifically to influence which 3rd
party floss apps/libs would make it in.

Let's talk about Solaris. To **me** Solaris means/meant:
- SMP scalability.
- Stable interfaces (of all sorts)
- Backward binary compatibility (Theoretically back to Solaris 2.1)
- Serious engineering foresight
- A measured and planned development process
- Market leading SVR4 UNIX(TM) distribution (To me SVR4 is practically
synonymous with Sun Solaris, as Sun was the leader in developing the
SVR4 specification/code).
- Platform stability (These were systems that could go for years
without reboots, and/or crashes).
- Relative lack of bloat

Some negative associations:
- Very high cost
- Weak x86 strategy (Slower than Linux on comparable hardware. Slowlaris)
- Difficult to administer (Different than Linux, and hard to get open
source software installed)
- Tied to "crippled" Sparc architecture (This was when Power and x86
were killing Sparc on comps).
- Closed/Proprietary
- Stagnant

Recently some new traits have become associated with the Brand:
- ZFS File systems (Kick ass filesystem)
- Dtrace instrumentation (Super great debugger / application tuner)
- Open source, community, development process, (global)
- Optimized for AMD64 systems (Some might think that it only runs on
AMD64 systems, and only in 64bit mode)
- Awkward interfaces - Difficult to administer (We haven't shaken the
difficult to admin tag)
- Bloatware

People also think Solaris 10 is based on the OpenSolaris codebase.
When in fact Solaris 10 predates "OpenSolaris", but has code "bundles"
(Don't know the Sun term) developed in the open Solaris development
process fed back through Sun's firewall to enhance the current
shipping version of Solaris.

The point is "Open" was the modifier to "Solaris". Now "OpenSolaris"
seems to have displaced "Solaris" in many people's minds.
"OpenSolaris" refers to a community, a codebase, and more and more
often is used to refer to various OSes. In particular Sun's SXCE/SXDE
products, and the Belenix and Nexenta distros. (Not to leave out
Shilix and Martux, but the attention is on actively developed x86
distros).

Recently, there was a proposal expressed by Sun marketing to brand a
Solaris distribution currently referred to as "Project Indiana", as
"OpenSolaris".  This proposal also indicated that as far as software
product goes, "Indiana" would have exclusive rights to use the
"OpenSolaris" trademark.

Needless to say, this proposal has been met with mixed reviews, and is
"somewhat" controversial. On one side there are those that want to
rally behind one piece of software, and "unify" the "OpenSolaris"
world behind one distro. On the other side are those that believe
"OpenSolaris" should not be used for anything other than the
community, and the source code base (because OpenSolaris should not be
owned by or associated with any one thing).

This leads us to a position today, where the community needs to
develop guidelines on how the mark "OpenSolaris" should and can be
used. (Sun of course will have final say on a community decision, but
the indications at this point are that Sun wishes this to be a
community developed and endorsed set of guidelines).

One problem we face, when it comes to allowing anything the exclusive
use of "OpenSolaris", is that OpenSolaris is currently the general
term used to refer to anything associated with open sourced Solaris.
e.g. - "I'm running OpenSolaris" refers to a number of distros, and
can even mean Solaris 10, "I'm an OpenSolaris developer", means that
you develop Solaris, or you develop software that runs on Solaris, "I
developed an OpenSolaris distro" is pretty self explanatory, "I am in
an OpenSolaris usergroup", "I am part of the OpenSolaris community"
are two other uses that most of us understand.

Now that I have given some background, I am going to propose a few
"OpenSolaris" uses that I think we can agree on:

1) The codebase hosted in mercurial @ OpenSolaris.org. As in "the
OpenSolaris code".
2) The community. Anybody who has a positive interest in current and
future uses of anything Solaris related, and self identifies
themselves as such. "the OpenSolaris community" IE: If you think you
are part of the OpenSolaris community then you are. (This was limited
to developers, but I think we can agree that the comunity has grown to
include many other type of community member).
3) The core software. O/N (OS, and Networking). "The OpenSolaris
core". Note this does not need to include packaging tools.
4) Miniroot. "OpenSolaris miniroot"

Uses where Sun's viewpoint may differ from the community's:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) "an OpenSolaris distro" Sun management has indicate that they wish
this term to be limited to binary derivatives of Indiana. I suspect
that the community would refer to anything that is an OS running a
source derivative of the OpenSolaris kernel as an OpenSolaris distro.
(P.S. - adding a modifier distribution, seems to imply that there are
more than one.)
2) "The OpenSolaris distro" Sun management would like to see Indiana
have this name. The community has various viewpoints: a) there is no
"The OpenSolaris distro", nor should there be. b) there should be a
"The OpenSolaris distro" and Indiana is not it (those that think
either Nexenta or SXCE should carry the label). c) there should be a
set of bits called OpenSolaris, and I don't really care what it is, as
long as we all can agree to the same set of bits being "OpenSolaris"

Open questions (with my thoughts):
------------------------------------------------
1) Is there something smaller than O/N that can be referred to as
OpenSolaris? (I think at the very minimum, we should be able to have
the kernel be named OpenSolaris. As in the OpenSolaris kernel. (This
would not be limited to source or binary, nor would it be limited to
platform/arch.)
2) How do we want to phrase the "binary application compatibility"
guarantee? (Or do we even allow this phrase.)
3) How does something get certified as "compatible"? (with Solaris) (I
think we need to develop a test suite, that works by running a set of
binaries on the distro that wishes this certification. Please note
that this is not a Sun certification.)
4) Do we want to establish a certification process for use of the term
"OpenSolaris" (IE: Whatever we decide as policy, does a group of
people need to sign off on uses, or will we basically trust people,
and rely on people to report perceived violations of policy.)

Cheers,
Brian

-- 
- Brian Gupta

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/