[ug-bosug] Yet another criticism of opensolaris 2008.5

[Jim Grisanzio]

Sriram Narayanan wrote:
> http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18441/1090/
>   

Interesting piece. So much of it is so wrong, my goodness. He does have 
a good point or two buried in there, but you have to really dig out from 
all the attacks.  He points to a few older blogs that several of us 
responded to, yet he doesn't mention any of the challenges to his very 
assertions. It's just not a balanced piece to be taken seriously. Now, 
having said that, I'm more than willing to read honest criticism of the 
project (heck, we do that ourselves!), but when it's just an attack I 
tend to pass it over these days. Oh, well, keeps us on our toes, I guess. :)


> This is just a reminder to us all that when we evangelize opensolaris,
> we need to emphasize  what makes opensolaris special.
>   

Agree. There are a lot of good things to talk about, and since so many 
people have never even heard of us we can spend years just focusing on 
the positive things we have to offer.


> But an important thing to remember is to never criticize Linux in an
> attempt to push opensolaris. 

I *totally* agree with this.  I've been saying this for all of my seven 
years at Sun, actually. :) Also, here in Tokyo I participate in the 
Tokyo Linux User Group and those guys have been nothing but welcoming to 
me and OpenSolaris. So are the BSD guys. They even came to the launch we 
did last week: 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/opensolaris_2008_05_tokyo_launch. In 
fact, we are going to start doing some joint OpenSolaris/Linux meetings 
in the future, and I'm sure we'll do some OpenSolaris/BSD meetings, too. 
Should be great fun. By the way, if any BOSUG developers want to come to 
Tokyo, the TLUG guys would love to hear about BeleniX from a technical 
perspective. I can set it up. Also, I now have a TLUG logo on my blog. :)

Here's my only competitive point of view: we should direct our 
competitive energies toward Microsoft Windows.

> I had to listen to a marketing person in
> the US criticizing Linux when he was explaining to me how to sell
> Solaris to my management (He was preaching to the converts, really)
> and I was disappointed then that he didn't mention a single good point
> about Solaris itself.
>   

Very good point. We waste our time by not being positive.

> Lots of people are likely to just criticize the CDDL decision, declare
> that this is "yet another gnome desktop trying to compete with KDE"
> etc without really bothering to find out the multitude of underlying
> features that set Solaris apart and which Linux, etc just cannot catch
> up with.
>
> Actually, I think the onus is also on Sun to highlight opensolaris
> differentiators since they want to market opensolaris 2008.5 as a
> commercially supported download

Thanks for sending that link. I hadn't seen it.

Jim

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