Life is so good, it gets better every day

OSWN – One Year Old

Just over a year ago, Ben mailed desperately seeking an OpenSolaris celeb to compile a weekly news. I had some time and a desire to help those who didn’t have the same amount of time to be reading 1,000’s of mails, and so put an attempt at the first issue of the weekly news, summarizing about 15 mailing lists. During that time, Eric stepped forward with his bi-weekly rollup experiment, also targetting similar lists. The program team also stepped forward to produce the OpenSolaris Newsletter. The documentation content being produced from the project was excellent.

A year down the line, and we’re at issue #53 before I knew it, expanding to 30+ mailing lists. I feel it’s been a pretty good success, and hope it’s proved useful to people. It’s been an awesome way personally for me to track what’s been going on within the various community and project groups, who’s been involved, and given me a broad understanding of the dynamic of the community. What I’ve really sucked at, is providing infrastructure and guidance for others to take on the role of compiling the weekly news summaries. I need to really sit down and think about this over the next couple of months, most of all because I believe it’s unhealthy having a single failure point in anything we do as a community.

Please Vote

Reasonable communication doesn’t seem to be working. Time for to start the blackmail campaign…

Considering there’s only 61 people who have voted so far, that’s a lot of kittens. Please think of the kittens.

CHA-CHING DING-A-LING!

Tired of wasting away your summer flipping burgers at the local restaurant, because you had the morals to refuse a programming project working on a proprietary product? If yes, then the Google Summer of Code is for you! Along with a large list of participating organizations, OpenSolaris offers you the chance to come join our community, work on a list of great projects, and earn $4,500 US while doing so.

We have a spectacular line up of project suggestions, including the following little gems close to my own heart –

• OpenSolaris Emancipation! – a chance to really make a huge impact in the community by releasing it of its proprietary shackles. There’s still a few proprietary modules that need replacing. If you step up to this one, you will be a hero among men..and women!
• DTrace and Firefox – Firefox has become our favourite browser, yet there are times when performance is less than ideal. With the introduction of DTrace to the mix, you have the tools to turn this around. Profile the browser, figure out what’s going on, and kiss the slow bits goodbye by writing some awesome patches!
• Virtualization and X – Virtualization is the new buzz word in today’s operating system environment, which presents some user interface thoughts. How do we visualize the virtualized? Come up with mockups, implement them in your desktop and window environment! Show us the bling!

But that’s not all – you too can suggest your own proposals and we’d love to hear them! Proposals are due by no later than 24th March, through the application page. We’re hoping to host 5 student projects this year – now’s your chance to be one of them!

Acceptance!

“Congratulations!
Your organization “OpenSolaris” has been accepted in to the Google Summer of Code(tm) 2007. You have been assigned as primary point of contact and as an administrator for your organization.”

Woo. OpenSolaris is officially a part of Google’s Summer of Code 2007. While the students start applying, don’t miss out on being a mentor this year – it’ll be incredibly rewarding (last year’s Google tshirt was pretty ace), and an awesome opportunity to really get a feel for the barriers to entry of our project and be in an excellent situation to give feedback on what areas we need to rock at more.

Thanks Google!

A Step Up and Harder Step Out

I finally got myself sorted to buy one of these buddies, thanks to Sun’s revenue continuing to do well – nice to know everyone on blogs.sun.com contributed to this purchase, huh? Looking forward to getting out for a spin, and getting used to SPDs for the first time. It was a pretty complicated decision. There are lots of factors into choosing a bike, not just your typical make, model and colour – and I must confess I was pretty out of my depth for a lot of it. Dave has been awesome explaining some of the componentry which helped heaps. It’ll be good to take it up to Wellington to ride the tracks up there, but hopefully I can get some time in the saddle before we head off.

X and Y Network Misery

When X meets Y, you sometimes get embarassing performance problems. Enough said.

GSoC Project Ideas

The OpenSolaris mentoring organization application has now been submitted to the Google folks for review, check it out here. While the application form itself was relatively painless to submit, coming up with a good list of projects was a lot harder. The results of this are here. Obviously this is just a taster for students to have a look at, though we’re looking forward to seeing some really rocking inspirational proposals, assuming we get accepted as a mentoring organization. Happy summer hacking!

Polls are Open!

As Stephen announced, the OGB election and constitution ratification polls are now open! I would heavily encourage all core contributors to vote in this election – it’s really important for the well being of the project as a whole to get a good turnout. As always a list of candidates and their positions/bios/others is available on the OGB status page. You may want to wait for a few days still, as many candidates still haven’t shown their hand. I really hope they do because I’d like to think I would spend my votes wisely.

Interview Central

Simon interviewed me this afternoon, as part of his special election series on the OGB candidates. We had to do the interview twice because the sound quality was poor on the first interview, and he cunningly changed the second set of questions. I didn’t sound too much like a wonk, though said ‘you know’ about 20 times during the 12 minute interview – I blame my up bringing, and possibly the Havoc effect.

James Purser interviewed James McPherson, Joshua Clulow and myself later this evening on his ‘Open Source on the Air’ podcast series. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear much of the conversation due to a bad phone connection, but check it out when he uploads it on Thursday.

Last month I travelled over to Menlo Park to take part in a series of SDN (Sun Developer Network) webcasts about open source. I see the series has started this month, with Simon spotlighting Sun’s open source involvement. Predictably, I talked about our GNOME involvement. It was a pretty interesting time behind the scenes as they were churning out the month’s episodes and a reasonably fun experience, even though I was pretty nervous.

The opinions, views, or comments do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, especially when nervous energy makes me talk complete crap.

OGB Questions from the DTrace Community

Bryan posted a couple of well thought out questions on behalf of the DTrace community, so given that we’re supposed to be in the campaigning period, I thought I’d post a link to my answers. A lot of the questions were about licensing issues and specific points about the constitution. What I’d love to see now is some meaty questions dealing with community interaction, infrastructure and how we can grow going forward. It will be interesting to see how the current test poll answers some of the priorities of the core contributors in the project.

FWIW, having looked at the test poll, the questions are somewhat confusing, in that prioritizing one item would automatically include another. In any case, here are my answers given that it’ll give people a better idea of where I stand wrt to my candidacy –

1. Create an infrastructure project to run opensolaris.org (‘Infrastructure’)
2. Reorganize the existing Community/Project organization (‘Reorganize_Community’)
3. Deploy a public defect management system (‘Defect_Mgmt’)
4. Replace opensolaris.org tools with an open source CMS or wiki (‘New_CMS’)
5. Deploy a public wiki on opensolaris.org (‘Wiki’)
6. Replace or remove Jive forum interface (‘No_Jive’)
7. Deploy a public code review facility on opensolaris.org (‘Code_Review’)
8. Deploy a public Request To Integrate (RTI) system (‘RTI’)
9. Remove inactive Communities or Projects (‘Remove_Inactive’)
10. Eliminate reliability issues with opensolaris.org web pages (‘Reliability’)
11. Provide an x86/AMD64-based kernel/project build facility (‘X64_Build’)
12. Provide a SPARC-based kernel/project build facility (‘SPARC_Build’)