[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Ceri Davies]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 02:26:57PM +0100, Ceri Davies wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 09:24:44PM +0900, Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> > Ceri Davies wrote:
> >> My point being that this is going to go down like a fart in a lift.
> > 
> > Hello, Ceri. That's really an unfortunate comment given the hard work many 
> > people have been putting into making this initial release successful. It's 
> > obviously a work in progress, and great strides have been made in a 
> > relatively short amount of time.
> 
> I know this, the target audience do not.  It is a barrier to acceptance
> and adoption and this thread is all about that, as I understand it.

Allow me to expand on this, since I know at least yourself and another
man I respect are misinterpreting my intent.

I like the OpenSolaris community and the people in it.  I see and
very much appreciate the hard work that goes on, and have contributed
code, documentation work, time and effort everywhere from shielding folk
who stray into #opensolaris from hostility there to making presentations
and talking it up locally, and more.  Additionally, while I have no
intent of deploying it in my business, I also know and appreciate that a
large number of people have spent inhuman amounts of work on getting the
OpenSolaris 2008.05 release out of the door, I really do.

However, as both a long time Sun customer across two industries
(telecoms and FE) and a member of a reasonably large open source
project (FreeBSD) for many years already, I think I have some useful
experience.  So when you specifically asked "we are doing some great
things here as a community, and that's not getting out nearly as much as
it should. Why?", I thought you might be soliciting opinion.  You asked.

Unfortunately, that opinion is that the folks being targeted either
a) hate Sun and all its offspring, b) won't look until everything
is GPL, c) certainly won't be happy that "Open"Solaris can't easily be
checked out, d) really don't care who worked how hard, e) only run
Linux, f) looked at the community and couldn't work out how to
contribute or g) some combination of the above.

If we really want to go after those folk, we need to come up with
responses and "fixes" to those things above that we can do something
about.  Unfortunately, "we worked really hard" isn't a response that
will cut it with these folk, I'm really sorry, but it isn't; see d)
above.  If things don't work the way they expect, then they'll likely
not stick around, it's the harsh reality and I'm only saying so because
you specifically asked.  Only the worst of friends will let you walk
around with spinach in your teeth, after all.

Now, I will continue to work on the bits that I can work on because it's
going to require a lot more work to surmount all of the above.  Unless,
of course, you still think that we should just kick dissidents like me out,
in which case I won't need pushing - I have a family I could be spending the
time with, after all.

As part of that hard work, we have to listen to things that we don't
like hearing, and then keep making the steps without expecting those
who don't know us to applaud how much has been done already.  We know,
we can be proud of what's been done, but working hard isn't a goal in
itself.

Ceri
-- 
That must be wonderful!  I don't understand it at all.
                                                  -- Moliere
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