[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jason J. W. Williams]

>         These people are now the decision makers that buy Linux related
>         stuff. This is why I call this generation a "lost generation".
>         You will not get these people back with a reasonable amount of
>         effort. Even worse: listening to these people has a high potential
>         of losing the old SunOS community that still exists.
>


I strongly disagree with the idea that you will not get them back,
primarily because I belong to the "lost generation". My experiences
with Solaris in college in the late nineties and early 2000s was
abysmal. We had a brand spanking new CS lab donated by Sun...after
hacking with Solaris for a week we wiped them and loaded 'em with SuSE
for Linux. Why? Everybody had more experience with the GNU toolchain
and it was almost impossible to get Solaris to work right with our
OpenLDAP server for central authentication.

Anyhow, myself and my colleagues at my current company all went to
school together and were hell bent on not running Solaris as a result
of those experiences. That is until we had reliability issues with
Linux, OpenSolaris became available circa 2005, and we were forced to
look for other options. Without OpenSolaris you wouldn't have
recovered the small part of the "lost generation" that works at my
company.

Not to mention that the GNU toolchain works properly now on Solaris,
and Solaris as a whole is easily accessible to Linux-trained folk
thanks to a lot of work in the last 3 years. Imagine what would've
been the case had this been available circa 2000 when we were CS
students? I think its a mistake to write off evangelization to an
entire group of folks who are software hackers and therefore curious
by nature. Just my two cents.

-J