[osol-mktg] reference distribution

[Patrick Finch]

Hi,

 > At the same time, we'd continue moving the production of (what was
 > called) Solaris Express out into the open. Wouldn't that achieve the
 > same thing ?

Not necessarily, if Solaris Express will always be the bleeding edge for 
Solaris users and, presumably Sun Microsystems will want to reserve the 
option of including some closed components in its distribution of 
OpenSolaris, no?

In the interests of simplicity, I agree it makes sense, but I suspect 
that Sun (and Sun's Solaris Express customers) have a need for Solaris 
Express as-is.  We should ask this of the Solaris business unit to be sure.



Patrick



Tim Foster wrote:
> Hey All,
> 
>  - here goes!
> 
> On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 11:07 -0700, Stephen Lau wrote:
>> Question...
>> if a community-driven reference/base distribution of OpenSolaris were 
>> created with only the open sourced components
> 
> Ok, why ?
> 
>> I think this could considerably help the evangelism (advocacy, whatever 
>> the accepted PC word of the day is) of OpenSolaris.
> 
> So replace "Solaris Express" with "OpenSolaris Reference", and continue
> down our path of gradually replacing the closed portions of Solaris with
> the (presumably newly written) open components and you're on to a
> winner.
> 
> At the same time, we'd continue moving the production of (what was
> called) Solaris Express out into the open. Wouldn't that achieve the
> same thing ?
> 
>  [ and leave Solaris Express Developer edition where it is, with
>    support, etc. as before ]
> 
> 
> I guess I'm thinking that building a community reference edition would
> be a bit of a duplication of effort, given that there's already a group
> of people paid to do release engineering, program management, etc. of
> something that includes the OpenSolaris source base. Now, it's not fully
> open source, but as I understand it, that's something that Sun are
> trying to fix.
> 
> If the problem we're trying to solve is that Solaris Express isn't
> freely distributable, then can't we just[1] make it freely distributable
> and re-brand it as $foo ?
> 
>> Bonus points if we could make it fit onto 1 install CD media.
> 
> 6 CDs for Solaris Express is pretty bad I admit.
> 
> 	cheers,
> 			tim
> 
> [1] Yeah, I know - the same way most coding problems are /just/ a simple
> matter of programming