[indiana-discuss] [trademark-policy-dev] [osol-discuss] [advocacy-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Simon Phipps]

[thinning lists again, it's the day for it here - I think this is a  
trademark-policy-dev topic]

On Nov 3, 2007, at 12:36, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> At the higher levels I'd want to see a goal of:
>
> "every piece of your distribution built from opensolaris sources  
> should
> be independently reproduceable from source, and changes between the  
> base
> opensolaris sources and the sources used in the build must be clearly
> identified".
>
> If the source changes can be identified, then an expert user can  
> make an
> independant judgement about whether the changes are sufficiently
> compatible for their purposes.

I've read a few messages about "compatibility" now that say things  
that imply compatibility is a flag for the expert developer. While  
that may be valuable, and we will want that as an element of the  
"built with OpenSolaris" brand usage (actual name TBD), I think a key  
goal has to be an indication used by the distro itself that a non- 
expert can expect to be able to point this distro at a well-known  
public repository (again, TBD) and run everything they find on it  
without an issue. That should be the gating factor for the higher,  
"$DISTRO OpenSolaris" brand (again, TBD).

I realise this raises issues for the existing distros but as far as  
the OS-using masses are concerned I think it is essential. We may  
need a middle-level brand usage for distros designed to use only non- 
GUI packages from repositories, but we have to stay focussed on the  
user and their deployer-developers rather than on us in the co- 
developer circle[1].

S.


[1] terms defined in http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/community_roles