[osol-discuss] [osol-mktg] Upcoming Anniversary Activities for OpenSolaris User Groups

[Jim Grisanzio]

Karyn Ritter wrote:
> Sorry for the virtual cross-post...
> 
> The 1-year anniversary celebration is all about the great strides and 
> contributions the community has made over the past year. Start sending 
> out your ideas about what things the community can do to help celebrate 
> being open for a year. It's an opportunity for you all to stand up and 
> talk about all of the cool things that have happened over the past year.



Yes, it's been a wild year for OpenSolaris. Congratulations to everyone.

We opened after a long (and longer and longer) closed pilot period where 
Sun talked aggressively about the intention to do all this. Few believed 
us back then.

We reached out to Solaris developers, customers, partners, and multiple 
open source communities for a year, and a damn nice little pilot 
developed -- which was noticed throughout Sun and directly influenced 
Sun. During that time, Sun was also lambasted in the press for being 
late (too late, in fact). People said that the OpenSolaris community 
"didn't exist," that we could "never build a community," that Sun would 
"never open the good parts of Solaris," that "Solaris was dead," and 
then it got ugly from there. Well, they were wrong -- let alone not very 
helpful. But even better, the nascent OpenSolaris community performed 
rather honorably in the midst of that swill, I really must say. That 
early period taught me about what this community is all about.

To me, June 14, 2005 was about Sun opening Solaris. The Solaris 
engineers led the launch (a first around here, I can assure you) with 
blog tours through the code, while the pilot community taught us a great 
deal about the requirements and the potential community we could build 
together. Since then, Sun has been releasing code all along, but the 
community is emerging in new areas and is leading -- while Sun is very 
much part of that community in the form of hundreds of Solaris 
engineers. The community is doing things now that were totally unplanned 
  initially -- which means we have succeeded in the early stages of 
building a community right in our very first year.

So, the one year anniversary of OpenSolaris is not about Sun; it's about 
what the OpenSolaris *community* has achieved. Let's talk about what we 
have accomplished and how we want to celebrate those accomplishments. 
What we do and how we do it is our decision now. And we've more than 
earned it.

Here's my list of highlights off the top of my head
    (in no particular order, of course)

* Massive level of conversations on more than 110 lists
* Solid membership numbers that no one predicted
* Growing blog community (started from zero and now at several hundred)
* Diverse community/project representation (40 communities, 25 projects)
* Nascent user group community in multiple regions around the world
* Absolutely blew away all predictions of code contributions
* Non-code contributions also (docs, articles, websites, mirrors ...)
* Helped reverse the fortunes of Sun's Solaris product
* 5 entire distributions: SXCR, Schilix, Belenix, Nexenta, marTux.
* Ports underway: DTrace to BSD, OpenSolaris to PowerPC, Gentoo Portage
* Creation of an OpenSolaris Charter enfranchising the community
* Significantly positive press/analyst coverage
* Regular releases of code and binaries after the first launch (DTrace)
   and after the second launch (OpenSolaris) -- more tools, OpenGrok,
   and entire Solaris consolidations (storage, JDS, X, ZFS, BrandZ, etc).
* Development process and governance discussed in the open
* Participation at conferences: FISL, OSCON, LWE, Lisa/Usenix, Apache,
   JavaOne, MySQL, OSBC,  .... all around the world.
*
*
*
*
*
* help me out ... what else ?????????????????????????


So ....

What has *your* experience been with the OpenSolaris project? Did you 
expect this? What has surprised you?

And ....

How do you want to celebrate all this? I think we can agree that this is 
something worth celebrating, right?

Jim







> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [osol-mktg] Upcoming Anniversary Activities for OpenSolaris
> User    Groups
> Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:53:14 -0400
> From: Laura Ramsey <Laura.Ramsey at Sun.COM>
> To: ug-discuss at opensolaris.org, OpenSolaris Marketing
> <opensolaris-mktg at opensolaris.org>
> 
> 
> We're coming up on the 1 year anniversary for opensolaris.org...and so
> much has GROWN since June 14th 2005!  We have so many members, and
> projects thriving, and user groups in fabulous locations around the globe.
> 
> The OpenSolaris marketing team is starting to plan a few things to
> celebrate this great milestone--yes, t-shirts!  But we also were
> thinking about how we can create a worldwide celebration--Hopefully Some
> of the user groups may be planning a special meeting--and the idea of
> doing a webcast has also been suggested.
> So please, let us know what you might be considering--
> 
> Would a webcast be cool?
> Who would you like to see present on a webcast? What technical topic is
> of most interest?
> Will you be holding a celebration meeting?
> How many attendees would you expect at your meeting?
> 
> Looking forward to getting more of our planning underway!
> 
> Cheers,
> LKR
> 
> 
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> opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org
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