[indiana-discuss] [advocacy-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[John Plocher]

[Followups to trademark-policy-dev, please.
To post you will need to subscribe by first sending an email to
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  -John ]

Ian Murdock wrote:
> ... The first step to a branding program is to define
> the OpenSolaris binary core, and I invite the community to help define
> it, using the Indiana bits as a first approximation, with the
> understanding that it is OK to make mistakes, leaps of faith and
> simplifying assumptions as we figure this all out. 

> Followups set to trademark-policy-dev at opensolaris.org .

(At 8:04pm this evening, just as Ian was typing up his email,
we experienced a ~5.6 earthquake here in San Jose.  The USGS
says it was effectively right under our house (9km down and
4km east, but who's counting?  Coincidence? I don't think so!
Thanks, Ian! :-)

Ian makes a compelling point that a distro made up of everything on
opensolaris.org should be called opensolaris.

The question still seems to be if this view can be reconciled with
Joerg's and Brian's (placeholders for many, I'm sure) minimalist
perspective (i.e., OpenSolaris - the operating system - is only the
kernel, libc and a shell).

Maybe we don't have to reconcile them, because they are /different/
things.  Which of the following are OpenSolaris?  Duh, they all are.
They simply have different audiences:

     The OpenSolaris Operating System:
	At the minimalist end, we have a "miniroot" consisting
	of just the stuff needed to boot and get to a shell prompt
	on a specific device.  The audience for such a "distro"
	seems limited to those developers actually working on
	a particular device.  Think PowerPC and CellPhones.  Think
	small number of dozens of people.

     The OpenSolaris Operating System:
	Moving up in the world, this miniroot gains enough drivers
	and userland bits to become the basis for a dedicated appliance.
	Since the needed bits differ based entirely on what the
	appliance is supposed to do, and there presumably isn't any
	need for the user to add new functionality to a given one,
	the audience for such a distro is also limited to the small
	set of developers actually working on the appliance.  Think
	routers, web servers, mail servers, model railroad empires;
	think small number of hundreds of people.

     The OpenSolaris Operating Environment:
	At some point we have a miniroot, drivers and enough userland
	to produce general purpose computing devices.  Although one
	size could fit all (XXXL?), it seems reasonable to postulate
	laptop, desktop, blade, cluster and enterprise variations.
	Each of them will be characterized by their own recipe,
	optimized for the task at hand:  Laptops care about X and
	GNOME, web hosting servers care about Apache, Glassfish
	and python.  Unlike the device and appliance distros, these
	general purpose distros are targeted at the volume market
	with the expectation that their users will want to add
	3rd party features to their systems.  Think volume distros.
	Think millions of people.

 From a compatibility perspective, it is probably OK to ignore the
embedded device and appliance distros - there really isn't any
expectation that a user could take an arbitrary precompiled binary
package and install it on them.

This leaves the general purpose systems.  If you take all their
"recipes" and compare them, you will find a large set of common
features/packages.  This is what I an thinking of when I say
"compatibility Core" for the OpenSolaris Operating Environment.

Today we have SX, SXDE, Schillix, Belinix, MartUX and Nexenta
as examples of various targeted distros.  If I have a binary
program (say, oracle or my company's accounting package...),
and I want to pick a distro,
	Should I /expect/ my application to just work on it?
	/Will/ it just work?
	Does the distro owner have any expectations in this regard?
    and most importantly,
	How would I tell?

This implies that the branding needs to communicate something about
compatibility, and it should also be sensitive to the distinction
between Operating System and Operating Environment.  I'm going to
sleep on it and see what the morning brings before I go edit the
wiki...

   -John