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

[Simon Phipps]

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.

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. We need that baseline so  
that packages have a standard on which to test they run. Once we have  
it, it's then safe for many distros to flower on top of it.

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.

That is what our community branding policy should encapsulate when we  
ask Sun to enforce it. 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.

S.