Yesterday, the OpenSolaris team released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the fruit of Project Indiana. The first review we found was published over at Blogbeebe, which is overall fairly positive. At the same time, Practical Technology believes that "OpenSolaris has finally been released just in time to die".
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Member since:2005-07-24
My impression is that OpenSolaris has a different kind of community than Linux. Solaris has traditionally been a different kind of OS than Linux. As such, one should expect that a Sun led community effort around Solaris would have both similarities and differences with the community around Linux.
I would advise that OpenSolaris advocates not take these things too seriously, out of respect for their own blood pressure and general mental health.
As OpenSolaris expands into new territory, as it obviously is, judging from my experiences with this live CD, it is going to spend some time in the limelight. As a long time advocate of Linux, let me tell you something about what it is like to be in the limelight. Along with all the roses being thrown your way, you are also a perfect target for the rotten vegetables. And the best thing to do is simply to resign ones self to that fact, accept the roses gracefully, wipe off the tomato pumice, smile, take another bow, and get back to work.
An endless stream of rebuttals, and rebuttals to rebuttals will only get you a reputation for being thin skinned. Letting these articles get to you... taking them too seriously... is a recipe for strife. I should know.
It will be interesting to see how OpenSolaris' community evolves. It will be interesting to see how Sun's community-building technique evolves.
Edited 2008-05-07 20:29 UTC
Member since:
2006-03-15
Only a moron will make a claim that Solaris does not have a community. If you look at how Solaris was developed in the past and compare to how it is developed today, you will be shocked at the differences. Just look at what Solaris is turning into today. Xorg is used for their Xwindow system. Gnome for their desktop environment... and it is no longer even heavily modified. And let's not forget Bash as their default shell. Just about everything in Solaris but the kernel is now being developed by the community. What does this do for Sun? It lets them focus on what is truly important while drastically driving down costs. It lets the kernel be the only thing differentiating it and Linux and IMHO, with DTrace, ZFS, etc., Sun is in a good spot for that comparison.