From brian.nitz at sun.com  Fri Mar 23 15:28:09 2007
From: brian.nitz at sun.com (Brian Nitz)
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:28:09 PDT
Subject: [approach-discuss] request to be recognised as a contributor
Message-ID: <28467565.1174688919888.JavaMail.Twebapp@oss-app1>

Note that I'm not requesting "core" at the moment, so there is no rush before the election, but I would like to at least be recognized for some contributions across communities.

While I'll have to admit that the bulk of my recent attention was focused on supporting Sun customers who previously chose a GNU/linux offering, some of this recent effort was directed towards paving a path for migration from this desktop linux distribution to OpenSolaris.  Most of my OpenSolaris contributions are in the area of Q/A, discovering problems in internal testing and reproducing problems found in the real world:

  - Configured early brandz builds as a prototype migration path for a custom application which was tied to GNU/linux APIs.  This setup unearthed bugs and RFEs which when fixed, will make it easier for everyone to run gnu/linux applications under Solaris.

  - Logged bugs where there are gaps between what Sun's opensolaris distribution provides and what linux users expect.  Logged RFEs suggesting the integration of vim and libraries commonly used in linux.  Logged bugs associated with keyboard input and xklavier. 
   
- Helped find GNOME desktop performance bottlenecks on OpenSolaris, especially on Sun Ray thin-clients.  Configured a mozilla/firefox performance and test bed and made it available to the mozilla team.  Used libumem to find a large memory leak in libz and performance issues in acroread and evince on OpenSolaris.

 - Ported gtkbench to OpenSolaris, worked with the gtkbench author so that this benchmark could be incorporated into Sun performance team's automated benchmarks.

- Triaged one of the first opensource (GNOME) bugs discovered with dtrace.  Helped evangelize the value tools such as dtrace and libumem can add to open source communities.

- Provided support to early users of GNOME on Solaris on several mailing lists including the Sun Java Desktop System forum.

- Provided some linux migration and other OpenSolaris neophyte tips on blogs.sun.com/bnitz

I don't know the path from pleb to contributor to core contributor, but I hope to start somewhere.  As time goes on and legacy GNU/Linux support becomes a distant memory, I hope to spend more time contributing directly to OpenSolaris.  I hope that as someone who has long straddled the divide between GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris, I can provide useful input regrading some of the things they do right.
 
 
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