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06.14.2007
Hello World, If you're reading this, then this is probably of some interest to you personally or professionally. Hopefully both. I envision the New York {Open}Solaris User Group NOT focused entirely on Opensolaris, but more on Solaris as a whole. Why ? Because, quite frankly, people who use Solaris do not have to be associated with OpenSolaris, but not necessarily vice-versa. In other words, OpenSolaris is just one of many examples of how people use Solaris and where they would like to see it get better. There are different distributions of the SunOS kernel (Nexenta, etc.) that would and should have sufficient airtime as part of a Solaris User Group (especially a New York User Group). We have such a diverse set of users - from financials to telecomm's, from healthcare to academia, from life sciences to manufacturing, from service providers to OEMs... Contrary to misconceptions, OpenSolaris is not Sun's attempt at capturing open-source wind. OpenSolaris is about bridging development and user communities, by providing a mechanism to get closer to the community, to innovate jointly and help make the world a better place... and in the process to taste what's to come in Solaris proper, of course If you're using Solaris (and have no interest in OpenSolaris), then this place is for you, because (if you haven't realized this yet), one of the reasons we have created OpenSolaris is to help improve the overall Solaris experience. And we've further realized that the timing for reaching out to the communities, soliciting input, and sharing source, could not be better. Should Sun have open-sourced Solaris earlier? The hypothetical answer won't change history. And now that we are where we are, and now that we're here, we are going to try and honestly make the best of what we can with it. And that begins with understanding what people would like to see Solaris get better at, understanding how they (that means YOU) use it. In fact, for as long as I can remember, a typical minor SunOS release has traditionally been developed and worked on by Sun Engineering for roughly a good 12-18 months prior to being made available as a commercial, fully supported, release. That is to say, Sun engineers use the NEXT release of the operating system as their main development platform for a good while before releasing it. Yes, we eat our own :-). When you call in with a problem that ends up being accepted as a bug or a request for enhancement, it typically gets fixed (and tested) in the NEXT release of the operating system. Only upon successfull integration there, does it then get backported as a patch (or in an update) to the currently-shipping version of the operating system. Reference the illustration below for the current state of affairs:  With Solaris 10, we've taken development of the NEXT release of Solaris into the open. In many respects, therefore, using OpenSolaris grants you the visibility into newer features that will help shape the commercial version of Solaris at some point in not-so-distant future. Take a look at flag days to see what features get integrated into various builds of Nevada; this grants them soak time prior to being backported or otherwise made available in a commercial Solaris release. OpenSolaris is just one distribution channel of the next, currently-being-developed source and consolidations (dubbed "Nevada"). As for actual distributions that leverage the Nevada kernel, there is Solaris Express, NexentaOS, ShilliX, BeleniX and others. Have a look here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/ Why is this hosted on opensolaris.org and not an independent domain? Probably because Sun does have interest in acting as a facilitator for a centralized, organized process. There is only one version corresponding to an active, commercially available distribution of Solaris that is developed and supported primarily by Sun. Sun makes it available on multiple platforms: SPARC and x64 and there is community work to port to other platforms, such as PowerPC. So in summary, the idea then, is to learn from (and with) the community, to include other, non-commercial, non-Sun-hardware-focused topics and speakers and, in the process, learn from each other. Does that match your expectations? Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks and regards, Isaac |