[advocacy-discuss] Stickers?

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "un" == Uros Nedic <urosn at live.com> writes:

    un> Sounds like interesting idea, but I would not like to see
    un> OpenSolaris stickers on places like restrooms :). It'd
    un> definitely ruin the brand.

?!

someone open a window.  It's getting stuffy in here.

seriously, what is your ``brand''?  best OS at running ponderous Java
and COBOL apps for stiff top-heavy banks?  A restroom is a thoroughly
appropriate place for a sticker, assuming the restroom owner doesn't
mind.  no stickers in bathrooms == ``use opensolaris because you
probably won't get fired when someone finds out you did it''?

    un> Also it is interesting to start discussion how we would like
    un> that people perceive OpenSolaris and our Community.

one that aspires to greater openness and transparency than it
currently offers would be my perception and my vote.  

Maybe it's my bias to define things in terms of what they want to
escape, but bias or not this negative definition is really helpful in
giving a direction, and direction is worth more than just giving a
position, and it's more inspiring and effective at winning attention,
too.  Give a direction and show how we'll get there first: that's the
best way to win over developers.

Solaris has a terrible legacy to overcome: that of an ossified,
expensive, thorougly proprietary, awkward and AIX-y unwelcome
replacement for the much-loved Sun OS 4.x, used as an Oracle platform
and little else, at least little else by choice.

A second part of Solaris legacy is for renaming things in a way that's
confusing and arrogantly overestimates the amount of attention people
feel the obscure thing warrants, insults the audience by implying they
will be tricked by manipulation of language and version numbers, as
well as making it impossible to clearly talk about anything thus
creating this huge credibility gap of ``who's in charge of this
twitchy desperate mess?''  SunPro/SunStudio had at least one or two
other names.  The version numbering of Solaris itself has been renamed
*TWICE*.  OpenSolaris itself has been renamed---'OpenSolaris' used to
refer to the code coming out of hg---that is, the actually open
parts---while now it refers to the IPS distribution CD (which not only
includes proprietary software but is itself proprietary since
developers cannot currently run a full deevlopment cycle from hg ->
DVD as you can with *BSD).  Most other Sun products suffer from
similar renaming difficulties: the one I've seen is iPlanet/Sun
One/Sun Java Communications System/...whatever.  iPlanet and Sun Pro
are arguably best-in-class but wtf?!  Java version numbering was
renumbered and inflated too.  

so what the hell am I even advocating with the sticker?  After I
sticker all the bathrooms of the coolest German programmers, will the
name change to be repointed at something else?  because it already
changed once, to point at something a lot less cool, albeit simpler.
so I think I will keep on putting up GPL stickers for now, and using
opensolaris source with ambivalence while taking the time to advocate
only those specific parts of it which are awesome, like
ZFS/dtrace/zones, quieter but big-fucking-deal stuff like InfiniBand,
multi-ring NIC's, mdb, scalability to huge numbers of cores, and
architecture/process stuff like the formal tracking of bugs and
architecture improvements and interface stability which would be
completely awesome if we could find a way to bring in money and put it
behind the right work.  I'll advocate this and not the whole thing---I
actually don't see here a positive brand to support, but rather
something very ambivalent---so what I have to say about it is too
complicated for a sticker.

Maybe you do want to blindly get behind the whole mess (even if the
name is repointed again).  Fine.  The whole point of a sticker is to
be your voice and yours only, so use it.  

But in any case, cargo-cult copying of ingenuine markedroid behavior
gets my -1.
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