[advocacy-discuss] FW: Wider Advocacy Initiatives

[Siobhan P. Lynch]

I'll get to some of this later, since I have a ton of things to do this
morning, I really only want to address several key points, and try and
clarify my position....

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM [mailto:Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 5:19 AM
> To: Siobhan P. Lynch
> Cc: advocacy-discuss at opensolaris.org
> Subject: Re: [advocacy-discuss] FW: Wider Advocacy Initiatives
> 
> Hi ... happy to kick around your suggestions. Welcome ...
> 
> Siobhan P. Lynch wrote:
> >
> >
> > I have noticed that much of the OpenSolaris advocacy efforts are in
> > the usergroup/grassroots areas of advocacy.
> >
> >
> 
> The entire project is spreading the word.
> 
> We started from zero. Now we have 10,000 people on 250 lists and
90,000
> people registered on the site. We've sent out about 20K Starter Kits.
> We
> have 20 million lines of code and several distributions.
> 
> Universities around the world are teaching OpenSolaris, and Sun has an
> education program with more than 500 Campus Ambassadors all talking
> OpenSolaris at school. Then there is the Sun Tech Days World Tour
> Conference (running for two years with OpenSolaris in dozens of
> cities),
> the OpenSolaris Summit, the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, and
> several dozen other industry conferences where OpenSolaris is
> presented,
> not to mention the China and India university programs that are
> reaching
> tens of thousands of new students. And I think all the engineering and
> marketing efforts around Project Indiana (install, packaging,
> modernization, etc) will help us engage a very large number of new
> users.
>


I think, as someone in the corporate and open source developer
communities, I really didn't get almost ANY exposure to OpenSolaris
until I was looking to do something very specific for a very specific
project, and started looking around for tools to do the job.

This tells me, while all of these advocacy initiatives abroad are very
good (and probably are just as effective as the FreeBSD advocacy
initiatives in Japan in the early 90's), they haven't hit right where OS
needs to be to ensure growth in the US.  I see what you mean about
education initiatives, but the people who are effected by that may not
be leaders in the corporate communities for another 10-15 years, and
meanwhile, you have the Linux and BSD people leading the way, when there
are many OpenSolaris features that knock the socks off both Linux and
BSD (and I'm not abandoning the BSD camp, far from it, I want to see BSD
adopt some of the technologies, like DTrace and SMF, ZFS is already
there...). 

Plus they've ALL got the Sun logo on them :) Which while it gets
students working with a "commercial OS", the Linux and BSD's have "cool
value" :)

I think what I want to see is more commercial support away from Sun
itself. I think that Sun might be the problem, and not the solution. The
BSD advocacy efforts succeeded in *spite* of corporate "advocacy", not
because of it. 

And by conferences, I mean non-Open Solaris focused conferences, like
USENIX and other non-Sun and OS sponsored conferences.
 



> That's just off the top of my head. There is probably more going on.
> Oh,
> the contest, too ...
> 
> You bring up good points. And we are doing many of the things you
> suggest, but it does take time to get the word out around the world.
> I'm
> interested in hearing how we can do it better based on what we are
> already doing. I'm less concerned about reaching everyone, per say,
and
> more concerned about practical steps to ensure our growth. In other
> words, as we grow to engage more general users, how do we manage that?
> We are making a transition from a developer-only community to a
> community that has many more layers. What effect will that have have
on
> governance?

I'm not sure it should, per se. I think maybe splitting the developer
and guidance communities off from Sun, but allowing the "OpenSolaris"
trademark to be owned by a non-profit steering group with loose ties to
Sun might work, or Sun working out a free "licensing" of the trademark
to this Non-Profit. I'm not really sure, I just feel that Indiana has
turned into a project for Sun to try and grab back the trademark and the
Open Source project for its own purposes, and it has every right to do
so, I just think it will alienate and destroy any good will its garnered
among the people outside the Sun camp in development right now.


> How do we as a community do our own community building
> without having to rely on Sun for resources all the time? I started a
> thread a while back talking about some of these issues:
> http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=50069&tstart=0
> 

Yes, I think so, and I think that's where I was heading with my post,
not in the direction of relying on Sun more, but by not relying on Sun,
and forming support infrastructures without it. Inviting other corporate
entities (I know there's not many yet) to help with the advocacy
initiatives, etc.

-Trish