[osol-mktg] 5 most important things....for Anniversary....

[Jim Grisanzio]

To me the top five issues on the project are the following:

* The quality and superiority of the OpenSolaris code.
* The emergence and benefit of open development.
* The growth and diversity of the community.
* The market that the community enables.
* Opportunities for participation by customers, developers, admins.

In other words, it's all about the *code* and the *community* and the 
*market* that results from the all those people working on all that code 
out in the open. All that equals opportunity -- for Sun, for Sun's 
customers, for other organizations, for start-ups, for non-profits, for 
corporate developers, for individual developers, for large enterprises, 
for small enterprises, for governments, for universities, for users, for 
system administrators, for everyone.

The license is no longer an issue. The distinction between Solaris and 
OpenSolaris is no longer an issue. Sun itself is no longer an issue 
(because the OpenSolaris community runs the program and the Sun field 
is, presumably, now part of the OpenSolaris community). Also, most of 
these older issues in the original top five list are explained nicely in 
the OpenSolaris FAQ, which has been substantially updated recently so 
please feel free to direct people to it.

More comments below ...


Sara Dornsife wrote:
> I think the question is more than just how these are written, correct me 
> if I'm wrong Laura, but also if those are the 5 most important things 
> for Sun's field sales force to know - one year later. I've added some 
> comments below that don't feel very helpful, but I wanted to throw some 
> thoughts out there.
> Sara
> 
> Bonnie Corwin wrote:
> 
>> +1
>>
>> Teresa Giacomini wrote On 05/30/06 14:48,:
>>
>>> Wow Jim.  Short and sweet and amazingly clear.  Nice.
>>>
>>> Jim Grisanzio wrote On 05/30/06 10:23,:
>>>
>>>> Some suggestions ....
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Laura Ramsey wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> 1--Sun has open sourced the Solaris Operating System, and Solaris 
>>>>>> is now an open source operating system
>>>>
>>>> Last year, Sun began the process of opening the source for the 
>>>> Solaris Operating System.
> 
> 
> I don't have the wording here, (Jim?) but the benefit would be better 
> here than the feature.


Yah, I was just cleaning up the original statement, which didn't make 
sense to me. I actually wouldn't focus on Sun here; I'd focus on all the 
code that has been opened all year long and that offers multiple ways 
developers can engage with the project. Pick your code, jump in. Learn 
about the code, fix bugs, optimize apps .... etc.


>>>>>> 2--OpenSolaris is an open source project, a source base, a 
>>>>>> community, a website – NOT a distribution
>>>>
>>>> OpenSolaris is a source community from which distributions can be 
>>>> built.
> 
> 
> Something that would state the difference between Solaris and 
> OpenSolaris would be good. I think that is the crux of one of the most 
> important things for them to know.


See the FAQ, but here is a short version: Solaris is a product from a 
company; OpenSolaris is a source community from which products are 
built. The benefit of OpenSolaris is that the developers within the 
customers can interact directly with the community around the code. 
There are no filters anymore.


>>>>>> 3--New releases of Solaris are built from portions of the 
>>>>>> OpenSolaris code base--Solaris is a fully tested, and supported 
>>>>>> distribution of OpenSolaris source code.
>>>>
>>>> Solaris is Sun's supported distribution of the OpenSolaris source code.
> 
> 
> The field isn't here yet. They still want to know why, and how, the two 
> are different. I think this terminology doesn't mean a lot to people 
> outside of this group. I don't believe, I have nothing to back this up, 
> that this is one of the top 5.


Well, we can brief the field more if needed. :) Also, they are welcome 
to chime in here on these lists (we have 114 now). But really, the FAQ 
should answer most of their questions.

Perhaps instead of us creating a "top five" list and delivering it to 
the field to deliver to customers, how about we ask the field what their 
top five issues are and we can address those? I bet the FAQ will go a 
long way to answering the basic questions. I really don't know the field 
well, though, so I'm sorry if I'm not that helpful here. :) I talk to 
customers in the EBC, though, and they seem to get all this stuff pretty 
  easily.


>>>>>> 4--OpenSolaris contains source code for the major innovations in 
>>>>>> Solaris 10 – things like DTrace, Containers, Predictive Self 
>>>>>> Healing, ZFS
>>>>
>>>> The OpenSolaris source code contains all of the innovations found in 
>>>> the latest release of Solaris.
> 
> 
> In my opinion, the more important thing is that people can preview 
> upcoming Solaris features in OpenSolaris. It gives the project a value 
> for our customers.


Yes, that's a very good point. Get involved early, learn about the 
features and the code, etc.

But to be honest, I'd like people to feel they can do more than preview. 
All these customers have engineers living inside them, right? Well, 
those guys are all potential OpenSolaris community contributors. They 
have something to *offer* the community and they'll benefit by becoming 
involved as well. I re-wrote the original because it's not really 
accurate. ZFS didn't ship as a part of S10, for example.



>>>>>> 5--OpenSolaris is open source – CDDL is OSI-approved, best license 
>>>>>> for businesses—processes in community are transparent and governed 
>>>>>> by community
>>>>
>>>> The OpenSolaris community is transparent with processes for 
>>>> governance and infrastructure being discussed and developed in the 
>>>> open.
> 
> 
> This one begs the question about a license question. I like Jim's 
> response that turns the definition of open from license to behavior.


Yah, I'd leave the license out of it. Again, we have an updated FAQ on 
the license. Any field questions should be directed to the FAQ first. No 
need to re-write this stuff only for it to live and grow stale in 
multiple places.


Jim


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