[osol-mktg] Sponsor Project Indiana

[Jim Grisanzio]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Stephen Lau wrote:
> 
>> Patrick Finch wrote:
>>
>>> Some confusion for some people perhaps, but it is possible to 
>>> communicate a change.  For the last 2 years I have been dealing with 
>>> the confusion that "OpenSolaris" is not a bootable OS.
>>>
>>> I can understand that there might be objections to naming a distro 
>>> "OpenSolaris" for other reasons, but I don't accept that the risk of 
>>> confusing people should disqualify the idea.
>>
>>
>> Well it depends.  There seems to be a disconnect across the Sun 
>> corporation as to *what* OpenSolaris is... 
> 
> 
> Which is why I keep seeing banner ads that say "Solaris 10: Free and
> Open Source" that Sun buys on various websites to add to the confusion.


 From a communications perspective, explaining OpenSolaris is extremely 
challenging when you consider all the diverse audiences around the 
world: customers and partners, competitors, governments, press and 
analysts, developers, administrators, users, university 
students/professors, etc. The fact that Sun keeps saying that "Solaris" 
is open source doesn't help, but I can really sympathize with that since 
in some markets it actually makes good sense to position the product 
that way.

Whenever I talk to people I always say that Solaris is Sun's supported 
binary product. It's closed. OpenSolaris is a subset of the source code 
for Solaris. It's open. At that level it's not confusing at all. It gets 
confusing when we try to make it out to be more than it is and explain 
all that across all audiences in all markets simultaneously. If Indy can 
solve that problem, cool. I'm all for it. I doubt that it can in the 
short term, though. I think this will take years to clear up, and I 
don't see any problem with that whatsoever.

Jim
-- 
Jim Grisanzio http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
--