[website-discuss] Restructuring the opensolaris.org infrastructure

[Alan Burlison]

We've been working to open source the software currently used to run 
OpenSolaris.org.  As has been mentioned earlier by Stephen Hahn, we are 
in the process of doing the necessary legal work to allow this to 
happen.  I can't give a firm ETA for the source being made available, 
other than to say that it is well under way and is being worked on as a 
matter of some priority.

We feel that the current software isn't really a good fit for the needs 
of the community in the long term.  We'd like to make it possible for 
other people to contribute to the infrastructure of opensolaris.org, and 
even possibly run some of it themselves, whilst maintaining a consistent 
look and feel to the sites within the opensolaris.org domain.

I'm working on getting some of the documents we have internally into a 
fit state to be published, a lot of them assume an intimate knowledge of 
the history of the project which provided the current website software, 
and of internal Sun terminology - most of which is irrelevant when it 
comes to understanding where we need to go to rather than where we came 
from ;-)

I've set up a page on opensolaris.org to try to gather this information 
into one place.  It's pretty skeletal at the moment but there are two 
documents that might be of interest:

1. Details of the current user cookie mechanism used by OSO, plus 
details of the proposed future mechanism.

2. A proposal for a distributed user authentication system.

If you have comments or suggestions, or there is information that you'd 
like to see on the page, please let me know.

The page and documents can be found at
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/website/website_restructuring/

-- 
Alan Burlison
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