[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Joerg Schilling]

Jim Grisanzio <Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM> wrote:

> As far as the "old SunOS community" you cite, I'm not sure it exists in 
> any great numbers. It's there, surely, but I'm talking about the 
> construction of a new and global community based mostly on new users. 

I would like to check the number of contributors or potential
contributors from both parts and I am sure that the number of
"consumners" is much higher in the list of the people who recently
discovered OpenSolaris.

> And I do think the OpenSolaris community has to be actively re-built, 
> and that's a position I've had from the beginning. We started four years 
> ago from pretty much nothing, which is why I have little tolerance for 
> the belly-aching from the sidelines about how we supposedly don't have a 
> community and how we basically suck around here. Bullshit. We have a 
> community. It's small but growing. We set out to build something, and we 
> are still building. We've done an outstanding job. I know that 
> "building" word may not fit in the open source world, but I can usually 
> find active building in most so-called "organic" efforts. Someone is 
> investing resources somewhere to do something, even if those resources 
> are widely distributed and not from only one company such as in our 
> case. I think it's a balance, that's all.

I believe that you cannot really artificially make the active community grow
faster. But it is inly the active community that counts.


> > What we need is that the right people inside Sun accept that there is a 
> > OpenSolaris community that is willing to contribute and that there needs to be
> > a supporting infrastructure for this inside Sun. This does not mean technology
> > but people! 
> >
> > Claiming that collaboration with OpenSolaris can only happen on the 
> > OpenSolaris.org portal is a mistake. This is an attempt to patronize the 
> > community. 
> >   
>
> I think for the main development issues it's best that they live here on 
> os.org since that's where the largest number of engineers are. However, 
> I'd very much like to see other related projects (distros, apps, etc) 
> develop and distribute globally. We shouldn't think in terms of one 
> community any more. We are part of a community of communities.

If you like to make people visible, it is sufficient to add the right links
to os.org.

Jörg

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