[advocacy-discuss] Proposal for new OSUGs in Hangzhou/Xi'an at China

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> On 2008年10月31日 19:55, Qingye Jiang (John) wrote:
> > Hi Wayne,
> > 
> > I will have to agree with you. Yes we have started
> the effort to build 
> > OSUG's in Dalian. It is coming very close now...
> > 
> > I guess the difference in Linux vs OpenSolaris
> communities has its root 
> > in history. Linux is perceived as a grass-root
> movement, where the open 
> > source communities existed before Linux companies.
> OpenSolaris, on the 
> > contrary, became open sourced from a close-source
> commercial software. 
> > We have seen people who feel natural to join a
> Linux community from the 
> > Windows camp, but doubtful when talking about
> OpenSolaris. 
> 
> 
> A counter example: MySQL vs. PostgreSQL.
> 
> I have been thinking for years why some opensource
> projects got popular 
> while others not. I haven't got a concrete answer
> yet, but I believe 
> there are many factors.
> 
> thanks/Xinfeng
> 

I think the name itself can be quite deceiving.  Of course, Linux seems to be much more popular than OpenSolaris, but the name Linux has become very generic.

For example, in Hawaii, the main Linux user group (or LUG) is called LUAU.  It used to be called LUAW but changed to LUAU b/c the latter has a special meaning in the native Hawaiian language.  The acronym LUAW stands for Linux, UNIX (mainly Solaris, as this is the prevalent OS used in the military), And Windows, and is not intended to include just Linux.

If you attend other LUGs, you will also see that at least FreeBSD is commonly discussed there.  Indeed, LUGs are expected to be the place where OpenSolaris will be first introduced to the general public.  We may see certain Linux stake-holders bad-mouthing OpenSolaris, but the general public don't care.  They only care which product does the best job (& which product offers the most green, i.e., business opportunities).

Until now, there is no use to hide the fact that the acceptance of OpenSolaris in the Chinese speaking world has been quite disappointing, to say the least.  However, I am seeing that things will greatly improve with the release of the os2008.11 LiveCD and its associated IPS packages.

For one thing, I know most Taiwanese developers will not (or I should say, cannot) use an operating system if it does not have the so-called "boshiamy" input method engine (IME).  Now that SCIM has been ported to OpenSolaris, we can easily add the boshiamy IME into OpenSolaris.  See:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=80964&tstart=0

The may seem to be a very trivial item, but it is one of the necessary conditions to entice a Taiwanese developer to the OpenSolaris camp.

Another obstacle that separates OpenSolaris and the Chinese speaking world is the font display problem in the Solaris version of OpenOffice.  This problem has not been widely recognized because (thankfully!) OpenSolaris has not been popular in China.  Some members of Sun's Beijing team are expected to talk to OpenOffice developers from Hamburg as well as the Linux developer from Taiwan who did the patch for the Linux version of OpenOffice, at the OOoCon that is being held in Beijing:

http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4076

I actually feel very excited that we finally will get what I believe are the most serious problems out of the way, and am ready to move forward in big strides. :-)
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