Life is so good, it gets better every day

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is here, and with the focus on simplicity, this blog post really shouldn’t go much further than 3 simple words -

• Get
• Learn
• Share

To those that contributed, thank you! You rock my world, and I’m incredibly thankful for having the opportunity of working with you.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is the first official release in a new binary distribution based on the OpenSolaris operating system. The single Live CD install image allows you to boot up to a desktop environment in seconds, and enjoy it before needing installing it onto a system. The introduction of a new package management system, IPS, allows users to install additional packages from network-based software repositories. The benefits of ZFS as the default root file-sysem provide the best environment to snapshot and rollback your system at any stage, with a best-of-both-worlds inclusion of the GNU utilities like bash(1). In many ways, hell has frozen over, and we’ve fundamentally changed how software is delivered to our users. For the better.

As Stephen mentioned there’s many more ways to get the install image, with both the Live CD and package repository being freely re-distributable, allowing those in network restricted countries to mirror locally and share.

To top if off, we even pulled off a new website, for those consuming our technology rather than producing it. It seemed the right fit at the time, rather than trying to shoe horn a significant area of growth for us into a set of heavily technical discussions.

Free CDs are also available - normally we ship one per person, but if you intend on organizing an event and you want more, let us know. Share the bubble love. Hubba Bubba.

Stephen and Tim talk about what’s coming in the OpenSolaris May 5th release - check it out!.

The year is flying. Really flying. Not only has NZ changed clocks screwing up my Google calendar settings once again, but I’m just over a week out to flying over to the OpenSolaris Developer Summit, starting a full month of travel. Jesse is continuing to rock in organizing the summit, and by the line up of rock stars attending, the event should be a real treat. If you haven’t made your arrangements and are in the area, do please attend - we’d love you to be there! I’m really looking forward to hanging out with all the people I met last year, and the few new faces that will be there too.

We’re also co-ordinating the summit with the first meeting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with jbeck, alanc, jimgris, webmink and plocher, and Michelle is keep us all in line as the OGB Secretary this year. We’ve had some incredibly productive calls so far, and will be nice to catch up over dinner on Friday night right before the summit. We’ll also be hosting an OGB Townhall at 15:45-17:00 on Saturday - if you have anything you’d like to bring up, email ogb-discuss@opensolaris.org, or log a bug against the OGB category.

No sooner is the developer summit over, then Jesse is going to wrap us all in a bus and take us up to San Francisco to attend CommunityOne - it’s free to attend, and has a pretty cool line up of talks. I’ll be taking part in a “Operating System Community Panel” with Bacon, Brockmeier and Wade from Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Fedora moderated by the charming Barton George. The event is free to attend, so you too can come along and throw tomatoes at us. I’ve heard rumours there’ll be an OpenSolaris party that evening too - bonus!

One day later, it’ll be into the JavaOne week and I’ve signed up to be a booth baby at the OpenSolaris stand, dropping into SecondLife, and hopefully getting to attend some of the keynote sessions. College students can attend free this year. Come by the stand and say hi.

Then it’s most definitely vacation with Jayne around SF, Spain and Italy. Woo!

As opensolaris.com starts to focus more on the ‘download, install and run’ experience, catering towards the consumer rather than the producer, a few people in Sun have been working on a design separate to that of the current opensolaris.org, here - though much of the content is still being worked out.

opensolaris.org will continue to be the live hub for most of the day-to-day activity we currently see across the projects and community groups - nothing changes there, though hopefully the benefit is that it will relieve some of the burden from opensolaris.org on trying to cater for 2 pretty distinct audiences than it was originally intended for.

Of course I can’t take any credit in this, but personally I think the design is pretty fabulous! Have a play with the mockup, tell me what you think!

I’ve just posted another round of logos, this time including a baseball cap, and the designs on different colours. There’s a been a little confusion from people, assuming that I’ve been the one creating them - I assure you I’m not, I have zero design experience.

If I had a preference, I think I’d go with the Bubbles - it at least signifies effervescence, and good health. It also actually looks pretty darn good on a t-shirt or bag, and something that I’d happily wear walking down the street. Does it pass the ‘wearing geek t-shirts in a pub’ test? Hell yes!

Every day I come across examples of why the OpenSolaris governance is really proving to be an obstacle with zero value return.

Consider this, James Carlson’s proposal for networking documentation sent late February. Since James is looking for a source code repository to do his work, it needs to be a Project within the scope of opensolaris.org (since that is what the website infrastructure can handle). According to the guidelines laid out in the project instantiation policy, Community Group’s are supposed to sponsor project requests, with their own discretion on how projects are discussed and approved. Once the Community Group approves the project, it gets sent to project-setup@opensolaris.org so the website team can create the project page. James is in this case using the Consensus voting system, requiring three +1’s and no -1’s from the Core Contributors of that Community Group.

17 days later, James is still looking for the required votes to start what, in my opinion, seems to be a great project. You can’t help but think how many people would have given up by now.

There’s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesn’t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute.

For anyone following the thread discussing a new breed of OpenSolaris logos, there’s some more designs, here and here. You’ll notice the skittles didn’t make it past the first round, and we’ve now introduced a few variations on colours and fonts. Feedback welcome!

With much of the current growth of the OpenSolaris community coming from the user community, it should not be a surprise for those closely monitoring the lists that the idea of creating a more user focused site would likely be on the cards at some stage. A new site that focuses on using the operating system, rather than necessarily contributing to it’s creation, seems attractive to many - both the existing developers who have been frustrated by simply wanting to focus on writing code, and those who want to use and advocate the operating system they love. It’s clear we’ve come a long, long way from the original vision of an equivalent kernel.org.

The OpenSolaris web infrastructure has not been without problems, however, as most of the tonic web team will attest - issues with shoe-horning in projects infrastructure and source code management systems, re-writing the authentication systems, a new grants and election poll sub-system, the infamous jive-mailman bridge, planet aggregators, bugzilla defect management systems and a whole host of other headaches. It’s a testament to the web team, both past and present, to have what we have. And with all its faults, it does a pretty amazing job, with some great content there. But rarely do we provide the opportunity for the non-contributing user to download binaries and run them, find out about exciting technology that is available to them, and help spread the word about OpenSolaris. opensolaris.org just isn’t that kind of site, to some extent, and I think we can do better.

And that’s why I believe we absolutely need to be looking at building opensolaris.com.

A brief look at some other community sites like ubuntu.com, opensuse.org, and firefox.com shows a very different focus - the minimum mouse clicks needed to download and install a binary artifact, or buy a piece of branded merchandise, or find out about a piece of exciting innovative technology that sets that apart from everything else around it. A few key words come through as themes -

• Get
• Use
• Learn
• Love
• Spread

Only then, in my opinion, can we even think about Contribute, and encouraging those people to come through the system and contribute to its creation.

A couple of us sat down to brainstorm what an initial pass might look like, with heavy influence from some of the many other community sites out there that do a good job.

About

• Featured Articles
  The featured articles would be a series of monthly updates to the home page, which could include information about upcoming events, profiles and interviews, technology overviews and such like. This section would act as the archive behind those feature articles or splashes.
• News
  News would provide the latest information about what is going on in the project. News would be briefly syndicated on the home page, to click through to a series of short paragraphs about the given news item. Press related articles and contact details for press queries may also be provided here.
• FAQ
  The section would list various FAQs related to the project as a whole, rather than individual technology.
• Awards
  This section would list some of the awards that OpenSolaris has won in the past, including some profiles of the developers or technology who were responsible.
• Contact
  This is the phone-book for OpenSolaris, providing details of all types of contacts - site support, press queries, including links into certain mailing lists or user forums.
• Sponsors
  This section would list some of the corporate sponsors of the project, in the form of a small logo and background information about the sponsor and their involvement in the project.

Community

• Discussions
  This section lists all the user oriented forums that participants can contribute to. Those interested in development will be encouraged to join the lists over at opensolaris.org.
• Code of Conduct
  If we had one, we might include it here, documenting the community rules of engagement and encouraging a positive collaborative environment.
• Developer
  This section would be the first landing block to a wider world of OpenSolaris development, introducing a set of guidelines for how to navigate a new domain, opensolaris.org.
• Blogs
  This section could be an aggregation of several existing blogs, or a single blog with multiple authors.
• Events
  The community events guide will list out all the OpenSolaris related events happening during the calendar year - Summits, Developer Conferences, Tech Days
• User Groups
  This section will be a window to the OpenSolaris user groups right across the world, with their own separate portal to allow them to control their own content.

Library

• User Guides
  User guides will be provided in online HTML form, and downloadable PDF for off-line reading and printing. This will act as the core reference library to access a plethora of subjects - from documentation about install and package management, to system resource management and trouble-shooting.
• Manual Pages
  This section will provide a list of all man pages for convenient online viewing.
• Howtos
  This section will detail some of the common tasks during day to day use of OpenSolaris eg. how do I set up a Wordpress instance on OpenSolaris?
• Audio and Video
  This section will provide some of the new media like video screencasts, podcasts or other medium to facilitate on-line learning.
• Books
  This section will detail some of the published books that are available, providing easy links (or associated ISBN information) to make ordering them simple.

Download

• Release Notes
  This section will detail the release notes for the latest releases of OpenSolaris, including any hardware requirements needed to run the image.
• Order a CD
  The section will allow the user to mail order a set of packaged CDs containing the latest release of OpenSolaris for free.
• Other Distributions
  This section will introduce some of the other OpenSolaris distributions available and where they can find out more information about them.
• Archive
  The archive will list all the previous releases of OpenSolaris, allowing the user to download an older release if desired.

Store

• The store will contain a number of OpenSolaris branded articles for the user to order like t-shirts, caps, bags, stickers etc. The store could also contain (or mirror) some of the free items like on-line fan buttons.

Support

• Report a Bug
  The user would be brought to an on-line bug reporting interface, allowing them to submit a bug about a certain problem they have.
• Community Support
  This section will link out some of the support options within the community eg. discussion lists, on-line user guides, IRC channels, FAQs and user groups.
• Professional Support
  This section lists some of the vendor options for professional support.
• Hardware Database
  A fully on-line searchable hardware database, similar to smolt.fedoraproject.org. The hardware database tool would allow users successfully running OpenSolaris to submit to this database.

I can’t claim to be an information architect, and there’s very obvious questions about content currently hosted on opensolaris.org that should move across to its .com equivalent. I’ve also glazed over many of the huge technical challenges ahead of us. What’s missing? What can be simplified? Where should there be close relationships with opensolaris.org, and where should opensolaris.com stand alone? I’ve started a thread about all of this on advocacy-discuss@opensolaris.org and website-discuss@opensolaris.org - come and contribute!

Pretty much since the inception of the OpenSolaris project, we’ve been using the full word-mark as the logo, and it’s worked out pretty well. We’ve produced some pretty awesome looking swag (the hoodies and bags given at at the developer summit count as my favourite so far), but to some extent, it has limited use. For example, try fitting it into a boot screen like Alan struggled last month, or using it in a desktop user interface, and you’ll soon find yourself struggling with the size restrictions. Could we free those up?

So, could we also change the logo to generate better brand affinity, and highlight some of the themes that are central to our project? Innovation? Collaboration? Boundlessness? A couple people at Sun have been looking at this very thing, and recently contracted an agency to start exploring some of these ideas -

There are other designs here - go check them out! Thanks to our lovely assistant Simon, and to James Duncan Davidson for the use of his photo of Simon at EuroOSCON.

What do you think? Are there any strong themes coming through? Could you imagine seeing some of those designs on some swag or in the desktop UI? Do you like the color palette, or the design? Could you suggest some changes?

Good to see the folks at NSA joining the community with their Flexible Mandatory Access Control proposal. Barton has some more details about the announcement. Best of luck with the project Stephen, and welcome to the party!