Life is so good, it gets better every day

Planet OpenSolaris NEW!

Thanks to Steve (and the tonic team), we now have a new home, planet.opensolaris.org. Hooray!

GNOME 2.16 Hits Solaris!

Saw this in my mailbox today from Shirley –

Given a Preliminary Go from QA, Vermillion build 53 has been successfully delivered to Solaris WOS build 53(snv_53) nightly on Wednesday.

Which pretty much means GNOME 2.16. The entire team has totally rocked, and hopefully we’ll now start seeing the benefits of the HAL packages that Artem integrated a couple of builds ago. We’re already talking about branching our repositories so that we can start building the latest 2.17 packages.

Foundation Elections

After many anxious moments, Vincent provides the moment of glory. We now have 8 candidates. We now have a vote!

There’s still time for more!

Foundation Elections

Having been off the board for 2 years now, I decided to go up again in the annual GNOME Foundation elections. I figure this time will be much less frustrating, and I feel like I have more energy to really get stuck in and build on last years absolutely amazing effort by the board. We have a smaller board which I feel works significantly better in terms of being able to turn around decisions in a shorter time. The financial situation is hugely encouraging thanks to the great work that Jonathan has done. GNOME remains strategically important, with a bigger than ever advisory board, and lots of different programs like the Womens Summer of Code, and GNOME Embedded and Mobile initiatives. We’ve finally made some good decisions that had been hanging over us for years, and I think we’re finally at the point where the GNOME project can start fresh and be excited about its future.

I hope that my candidacy will start a flow of people keen to help the project rock this year. Above all, being on the board is actually fun and rewarding, and a really good experience for anyone thinking about getting involved.

Planet OpenSolaris

Planet OpenSolaris is now live and unleashed! You’ll notice a couple of things from the outset. The current blogroll only includes a small selection of people right now. We obviously hope to expand this list in the future, but any additions will be according to a pretty strong editorial policy. Where possible, we want to keep Planet OpenSolaris to be as relevant and readable as its counterpart, Planet GNOME and I’d personally like to thank Jeff for paving the way there, and his support in getting this running. Planet OpenSolaris will be predominantly English speaking, though I’d also like to encourage other communities to set up similar aggregations for their language or region, and I’d be happy to help people set those up.

So why not use the existing blogs infrastructure? The current setup is difficult to read, forcing you to click through to the posts that you want to read about. The current list of bloggers aren’t necessarily representative of the community that is developing around the source. By mapping a bunch of people who write about OpenSolaris to their (IRC) nicks and faces, everyone will be able to identify with various tasks and projects going, and create a real sense of community.

Many thanks are due to Steve for his kind support of grommit.com. For now it will be hosted there, until such a stage that planet.opensolaris.org becomes available. Also thanks are due to Planet Solaris, which still has a valid place if Dave is keen to continue maintenance on it. For those currently on the blogroll, send me your Hackergotchis, or alternatively point me at a suitable picture I can use for you.

Rock on OpenSolaris!

GNOME Vendor Patches

Corey suggested aggregating some of the information about vendor specific patches into the VendorPatches wiki page. I think it’s a good idea, and added some basic information about JDS. Feel free to add information for other people shipping GNOME.

An Incredible Achievement

So this time, Java really goes open source, and in case you’re the last person on the planet to hear, the entire platform will now be released under the GPLv2 (including the classpath exception for some parts). Huge congratulations are due to the entire team who made it happen – you know who you are, you’re all rock stars. Check out the official announcement at 9am PST and watch some of the videos that are streaming in from people right across the free software community. In a bizarrely unplanned turn of events, the Java GNOME bindings go into Solaris Nevada at the end of the week.

Obviously there are some pretty insane challenges that are going to have to be faced over the next couple of months, and I’m personally hoping that the changes they bring will help other communities – everything from infrastructure like public bug trackers and source management, to tecnical issues like what to do with the TCK and what bits to release first to get to a fully buildable state, to more cultural issues like building/growing a community (though arguably it’s already there) and getting people in Sun directly involved. It’s another wonderful shift for Sun that makes things just a little more exciting. A pretty incredible year for the company, and I’m loving every bit.

Hell has frozen over. Very cool.

More OpenSolaris IRC Action

Awesome to see the localization and internationalization OpenSolaris community start an IRC channel, #opensolaris-i18n on irc.freenode.net. They’re still working on getting the translations out into the open, but already working on figuring out best practices and tools for the job. They’re super keen to, which is great to see, so drop in and say hi!

Little Miss Sunshine

I love the way you can go to the cinema, not really knowing much about a film and be in for a complete surprise. I went to see Little Miss Sunshine with Patrick and Dave this evening, after a quick eats at Charming Thai a small restaurant down on Columbo Street. The film was great, had me laughing from end to end, with a really great ending. I’d recommend this one highly, and now lust for a VW.

OpenSolaris on IRC

I guess there’s a lot of people out there that don’t really do IRC. It’s very easy to be distracted by it, very hard to switch off and ignore a window of constant conversation. For me, it’s been wonderful though. It’s the first personal interaction you get where you can start to learn about the people you’re working with and has been invaluable getting to know a lot of the GNOME folk in the 6 years I’ve been working at Sun.

Likewise for OpenSolaris. It’s been great getting to know a whole bunch of new people there. Being able to listen first hand to any feedback of how things are from a non-Sun perspective has been hugely educational, and a crucial step in getting the process of creating an open development environment. It’s also been personally great to be able to help various contributors out in real time, either by giving them information on bugs, ARC cases, or otherwise. Frustrating all round that things aren’t further advanced than we’d all like.

Without the continual help of Tpenta, stevel, sommerfeld, jmcp (while he was at Sun) and alanc, #opensolaris would be a very lonely place. I know there’s a lot more Sun engineers out there – I’d encourage you all to connect to #opensolaris on irc.freenode.net. Your community needs you!