[advocacy-discuss] FW: Wider Advocacy Initiatives

Mon Feb 11 05:58:35 PST 2008

Typo in sent address:

From: Siobhan P. Lynch 
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 8:56 AM
To: 'advicacy-discuss at opensolaris.org'
Subject: Wider Advocacy Initiatives

Hi,

First let me introduce myself briefly. My name is Siobhan Lynch, also
known as 'Trish" Lynch or "Pat" Lynch, during some of my more "butch"
periods in life, but I have a long history of open source advocacy and
development. Most notably I was known for my BSD advocacy work during
the late 90's and early 2000's, having written articles for Open
Magazine, Daemon News, and managed the Slashdot BSD section as
"BSD-Trish", "BSD-Pat" and "AilleCat". I also have a Emmy award for my
work in Interactive Television during the mid-2000's and now I am
working for a company that is basing a product on OpenSolaris.

So I have a long history of advocacy work that is successful, and works
on a level other than  "Grassroots" areas. BSD has had some great
infiltration over the last decade into areas where open source had not
been seen before. OF course much of this was riding on the heels of
Linux, but mainly it was BSD's strengths that brought it into the light
when pitted against Linux that really made a difference.

I have noticed that much of the OpenSolaris advocacy efforts are in the
usergroup/grassroots areas of advocacy. It seems that we're relying upon
the popularity of Solaris during the early 90's to establish a
"nostalgia" for a working OS, without telling people on a larger scale,
what has changed, what has gotten better, why Solaris is now "Open
Source", and what the licensing models its distributed under are. Many
people have misconceptions on the licensing that keep them from using it
in commercial products and/or in their businesses. And while we know
SXCE is not supposed to be used on a production level, there are many
features that make it perfect to help small companies and developers
move in the direction they want to be moving, Solaris was a picture of
stability during the early 90's, and when people thought of UNIX, they
thought Sun Big Iron, now you can get that same power on commodity
hardware, why not scream it to the world.

A few things I think that would help are things that I've seen work well
in the BSD world:

One: a full list of OpenSolaris (or SXCE/SXDE/Belenix/etc.) features
(even if it's a Matrix of each one, similar to how Linux advocates do
with different distributions now). A comparison of Linux, OpenSolaris,
and BSD chart, a OpenSolaris News site, similar to Daemon News, and if
that gets large enough, talking to Jeff and Rob over at Slashdot about a
Sun/OpenSolaris Slashdot section (there has to be a demonstrated need
for this, similar to Apple and BSD sections), OpenSolaris BoFs and meet
and greets at conferences other than  OSDevCon and OpSol related
conferences (ie. USENIX, SAGE, etc). 

I also think that the name OpenSolaris should be kept for the entire
community, this Consix/OpenSolaris debate is counterproductive, and I
say this from someone outside, looking in. I know that Sun wants to
protect a trademark it spent so long protecting, but as soon as it put
it out there, it semi-lost control, and now to take back the name would
be counterproductive at best, and leave all kinds of bad blood between
people. Let SolarisExpress be the official Sun distribution, and let the
others use "based on "OpenSolaris" which is a core set of code, similar
to how Linux is a kernel, and BSD is a toolset.

Usergroups and grassroots advocacy are huge, but they only get you part
of the way there, what else is being done to "spread the word", so to
speak, among those who are not in the Choir?

Interested in hearing some down and deep advocacy discussion....

-Trish

-- 

Siobhan P. Lynch
trish at reliantsec.net

Security Engineer
Reliant Security

Mobile: 646-401-1405

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