[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Dan Roberts]

Ceri Davies wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:40:56PM -0700, Dan Roberts wrote:
> 
> I'm throwing an oar in here, not to rag on Indiana/OpenSolaris,
> but because feedback on how we function has been requested.
> 
>> Solaris 10 will continue to have Updates to: support the latest 
>> hardware, continue to improve stability, and to port a few key features 
>> developed in the OpenSolaris Community back to Solaris 10 (ZFS boot, key 
>> networking advancements, etc.).  Sun will also make new products 
>> available based on OpenSolaris technology designed to work with Solaris 
>> 10 like our NAS appliance, or our xVM Server appliance.  And there will 
>> be a future version of Solaris based on one of the 6 month releases of 
>> OpenSolaris, which will bring the latest advances from the broad 
>> OpenSolaris community to Solaris customers.
>>
>> Also, let me be clear, the different releases of the OpenSolaris OS are 
>> not the upgrade path for customers of Solaris 10 in the majority of 
>> cases.  Future versions of Solaris will be that path, particularly for 
>> anyone that needs long term support (up to 10 years or more).
> 
> Solaris customers aren't concerned that the OpenSolaris OS is their
> upgrade path; they're concerned that future versions of Solaris (which
> will be) will look like the OpenSolaris OS.  That is exactly what we
> keep getting told too:
>  http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=205633#205633
> 
> Now you are saying a different thing.  The fact that Sun don't seem to
> be able to get the message consistent even internally is a large reason
> why the community growth is, or is perceived to be, faltering; at this
> point in time, people don't know what they're building, or what the
> development process is supposed to look like - or rather they do, but
> some folk who just released an OS called OpenSolaris aren't following it.

Be sure to note both paragraphs you quote above.  In the paragraph 
before the one you responded to, I say clearly that future versions of 
Solaris will be based on OpenSolaris.  The same thing Ian said.  So I 
don't see any confusion or conflict between the 2 statements.

Separately from all the conversations I've had with Solaris customers 
(and I've had a LOT), they are more concerned about how quickly they can 
get the new features/functions of OpenSolaris (IPS, ZFS as default, 
great new desktop, etc.) in a release of Solaris.  And as the 
OpenSolaris release gains traction and continues to improve, I expect 
that sentiment only to grow.

Are there some concerns, particularly around compatibility, of course. 
However I think the team has done a very good job striking a good 
balance between ensuring we're able to keep core compatibility in areas 
like the c abi and  IPS's ability to consume SVR4 packages, while 
modernizing the environment around the core.  And, because we have 
Containers and the BrandZ framework, we'll be able to deliver a complete 
Sol10 application environment on top of OpenSolaris (same thing we do 
for Solaris 8 and 9 on Solaris 10).

Dan