[osol-mktg] Sponsor Project Indiana

[Frank Van Der Linden]

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
>
> 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.
You're right that there's a lot of confusion, and we haven't been able 
to clear that up. Especially not since a lot of people at Sun itself are 
confused and have been mixing "Solaris" and "OpenSolaris".

Taking the line that OpenSolaris should have been a downloadable 
distribution would have been fine, if that had been the take from the 
start. Perhaps it should have been. But now it's too late for that. We 
made a promise that OpenSolaris is a codebase with an associated 
community. People have been creating distributions that are 
"OpenSolaris-based". If a distribution called "OpenSolaris" is created, 
they can't call themselves "OpenSolaris-based" anymore, because, well, 
they wouldn't be. And essentially, since the initiative would clearly 
have come from within Sun, the feeling would be that Sun "took back" the 
OpenSolaris name, and forced the other distributions to call themselves 
"Chopped Liver OS".

I would have no objection to something like "OpenSolaris Community 
Edition"; I think that's cool. Just plain "OpenSolaris" would 
essentially be breaking a promise.

- Frank