[osol-mktg] Re: perceptions of OpenSolaris

[Kaiwai Gardiner]

On 3/22/07, Tim Foster <Tim.Foster at sun.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2007-03-21 at 05:52 -0700, Kaiwai Gardiner wrote:
> > Firstly what is needed is an 'education' programme; a push that
> > focus's on "OpenSolaris' for the masses rather than a blog post geared
> > towards the coding boffins out there - almost like an infomercial on
> > OpenSolaris, installing, so forth.
>
> Have you seen:
> http://frsun.downloads.edgesuite.net/sun/07C00892/index.html
> [ which was put together by some folks in the FROSUG, and is included in
> the OpenSolaris starter kit ]
>
> In general, there's a content community that's tasked with this sort of
> thing - http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/content/ would you feel
> like writing an article or two ?



What I'd like to do is  do a 'Solaris as  used by Joe Average' with me being
Joe Average, talking about my experience running OpenSolaris Express (once
build 60 is made available) and my experience getting it up and running, and
the problems I encounter.

Not only to be used as a tool for first timers to see that OpenSolaris is
for more than just 'geeks', but with the problems I encounter, it'll spark
off dialogue on those areas which might have not been addressed otherwise -
"I didn't realise that setting something up that way could be confusing".

> Also, one of the major problems as far as I see is a lack of
> > communication as to where OpenSolaris has come from and where it is
> > going - a time line to lay out the development process, where abouts
> > programmers are in the time line, what the goals are of the specific
> > project are, what measurements are being used as to whether a
> > particular goal/milestone has been met.
>
> That's a difficult one to crack - if you follow Glynn's weekly
> OpenSolaris news, he documents a fair bit of the ongoing work of the
> community there. Also, check out the monthly newsletters that are
> produced.
>
> I agree with you, to an extent - in that it's hard to track the progress
> of many projects: you pretty much need to keep up with
> discussions/announcements any project that you're interested in.  All
> communication is done in the open though, so it should be just a case of
> having enough ears and time to take it all in - something I think that
> the weekly/monthly newsletters are trying to capture.
>
> At the IE-OSUG meetings, I try to give a picture of what's been going on
> for the past month, but again, it's a manual process - trawling though
> opensolaris-announce archives, the weekly/monthly newsletters and
> anything else that catches my eye on blogs or wherever.
>
> Do you have any suggestions as to how to do this better, or better yet,
> feel like helping out - I know Glynn's interested in eventually getting
> more people to help with the weekly summaries:
> http://www.gnome.org/~gman/blog/20032007



Hmm, not necessarily a recap, but more each project needs to have a project
leader/mentor who will announce at the beginning of the week some key things
he would like his 'team' to work on fixing/addressing/mending - not
necessarily an arbitrary target but more a goal, milestone for the week,
beyond ones own 'pet projects'.

As these things progress, the team leader posts on the team wiki what is
happening, can they address the problem that week, what possible issues
they're confronting as they address the set of problems , will the feature
be delayed? if so, the guestimated time it'll take to over come the
obstacles what are the obstacles? -  give an insight into the development
process - case in point, one could be a new feature being added support for
a device, obtaining the source code, going into the legalities behind
porting it to Solaris, the possible technical problems that might be
encountered during the porting of the driver; same could be said for a
particular library or service being ported to OpenSolaris.


Its more about an open dialogue than anything else; not necessarily a long
winded story, but even if it includes a one liner of, "trouble when porting
library to Solaris; features missing in certain parts further down the tool
chain, might delay the merging of the library in until those issues have
been addressed".

For a 'technically knowledgeable' person, it may sound stupid posting all
these things, but for the enthusiast, it brings them into the development
fold, allows them to be a fly on the wall, seeing things develop and know
why, for example, their widget isn't supported yet or why or what to expect
in an up coming build.

Matt
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