[opensolaris-summit] [ogb-discuss] My comments (very subjective) on proposed Summit topics

[Doug Scott]

Alan DuBoff wrote:
> However, with all of this in mind, we will soon have the ability to grow a 
> large repository of open source software, and I think it's important to 
> get people involved with OpenSolaris in this capacity, rather than just 
> working on the kernel pieces (ON, or what I consider to be OpenSolaris at 
> this point, what is available). Consider there are 20,000+ packages that 
> will potentially be available on OpenSolaris, it makes sense to try and 
> organize this piece in a coherent way that will attract and encourage 
> folks to participate. This is very different than the way folks 
> participate today, and potentially where we will need the most help. It 
> would be great if many distributions could build upon this repository as a 
> base, in the same way that folks like Ubuntu leverage the base packages 
> from Debian
Alan,
   I very much agree. I think while the ON project is the most important 
project within OpenSolaris, I think too much "contributing" emphasis is 
placed on it. I keep reading that people think that it is difficult to 
contribute to OpenSolaris, and if we limit ourselves to thinking that 
the ON project = OpenSolaris than this is true. It is actually very easy 
to contribute if you do not try to work on something that somebody else 
already doing. As you pointed out that there are thousands of packages 
and applications which can be ported to OpenSolaris. We should be 
looking at how we can utilise the efforts from blastwave, pkgsrc and 
spec-files-extra etc to build a large package repository. This is where 
I think we actually need the masses to contribute to.

Doug