Life is so good, it gets better every day

opensolaris.com mockup

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!

Re-thinking the Media Kit

Over the last couple of days or so, I’ve started to think about the media kits a little more, particularly with respect to get.opensolaris.org for the OpenSolaris release, but also in terms of being able to create derivations targeting specific sets of our potential user base. As I see it, I think it should be possible to create a generic framework that would allow us to swap in and out components, depending on that focus – with the addition of more CD’s depending on the focus.

As such you could think about a number of standalone ‘modules’ –

• OpenSolaris LiveCD ISO image
  This is the standard image that has been part of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview series, providing the user a LiveCD image, with an opportunity to demo it before they install it to their system. This will track the standard ISO images produced as part of Project Indiana, complete with IPS should they wish to download and install additional software from the network package repositories
• OpenSolaris Source Code
  With the very real limitations of network bandwidth across the world, most notably in emerging communities such as India, China and many parts of Africa, it is absolutely vital for people to have easy access to the source code. This module will provide source code to the various consolidations working out on opensolaris.org as a checked out repository (either Mercurial or Subversion), allowing the user to pull updates from the network or browse off-line. Additionally with a simple set of scripts provided, it will provide an opportunity for those running the OpenSolaris distribution to run an OpenGrok instance and allow full searching on the local source code. This could also be useful in a classroom environment, where network access is limited.
• User Documentation
  This module will provide all the user documentation for running the OpenSolaris distribution, complete with a number of tutorials or other guides.
• Developer
  
  In the developer section, it will provide a set of simple tools and applications to develop on OpenSolaris, both for the OpenSolaris community itself and also in the wider developer community.
  • OpenSolaris Community
    • Mercurial, SVN, OpenGrok, ..
    • ON build tools
    • Sun Studio Compiler
  • General Developer Community
    • Netbeans
    • Sun Studio Compiler
• Module Derivatives
  A number of variations of the Media Kit should be possible, including a tailored set of derivations of the OpenSolaris distribution. Some possibilities may include –
  • WordPress/Roller Blog Appliance
    Run an instance of the popular WordPress blogging application, with everything automatically configured out of the box, including a web server.
  • Ruby on Rails Web Developer
    Provide a running web server with DTrace enabled Ruby, Firefox and Apache server.
  • HPC Research
    Provide a set of developer tools to monitor performance and throughput for highly parallel tasks.
  • Others Appliances
    Are there other specific appliances we could be doing?
  • Xen Client
    Automatic Xen client configured out of the box.
  • Community Participant
    Provide an out of the box OS that could be installed to automatically mirror sources/binaries or whatever to another part of the world, helping the global distribution of OpenSolaris.

Let me know what you think!

Post Indiana Developer Preview 2

Time is flying. They always say the older you get, the quicker it goes, and that seems true for the latest release of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview, codenamed Project Indiana. The announce mail pretty much covers most of the changes since the last release, and another incremental step towards really changing the delivery model of software for Sun has been made.

Shrinking down to a single CD image has proved massively useful for me as a remote worker, and it’s given me the flexibility of testing several ISOs on the run up to the release, without hurting my broadband plan too much – I can’t help but think that it will give 1000’s of people in developing countries with poor network infrastructure an opportunity to try it out. While the application availability on pkg.opensolaris.org is still poor, the introduction of OpenOffice fills the gap for pretty much all my needs in my day job. I can now install the packages I care about, and my disk feels lighter. Thank you to everyone who’s worked on this over the last couple of months – your patience and dedication are appreciated. Thank you to everyone who have downloaded and installed it, and more importantly, given us feedback.

But controversy continues to be the compromise for that progress.

Stephen’s two blog posts, here and here nail the issues for anyone who hasn’t caught up. It’s been a roller coaster ride over the last few months, both personally, for the project and the wider community. John Plocher has been rocking on putting together a set of draft guidelines for trademark usage and branding, after the official response from Sun on the continued plan to call it OpenSolaris.

At a personal level, being on this project is massively challenging. Not only in the desire to create the best possible user experience while encouraging continued open development, but also in terms of community dynamics and finding the right line to walk between my Sun commitments and my community ones, namely the OGB. There’s no question that there has been a shift in the community, both indicated by Sun’s rightful desire to name the artifact OpenSolaris (of which I agree with), and the interesting discussion in defect.opensolaris.org around the independence of OGB members. Dalibor’s “Finishing governance before finishing bootstrapping is a bad idea” quote highlights one of the main concerns I’ve had from the start – you can’t just switch to a self governing community overnight, you grow into it. Nor can you expect to apply a model that works in one community to another. We are all different. OpenSolaris, comically, is no exception.

So where next for the project? I’m hopeful that it will turn out just fine, perhaps naively so, but I can see people trying out the developer preview and realizing that it’s not too bad. Most of all, we need to execute in a regular and predictable fashion, as a community in as transparent an environment as possible. United. Not just Sun, but everyone.

Thank you

I’d just like to express a big Thank you to all the people who came to Santa Cruz this weekend for the OpenSolaris Developer Summit. I had an excellent time meeting everyone from right across the community, and I hope those that attended had a bunch of fun too. Hope to see the numbers grow when we do it again in 6 months time.

I’d also, of course, like to thank the people in my team for rocking so hard, especially Jesse. And thanks to Sun too (Dan and Marc) for being willing to fund the event. I’m super pumped for the developer preview release at the end of the month, and charged to make the big push for a first release in Spring 2008.

A Fun Distraction

While I’m still more or less trying to find my feet in the marketing organization, the occasional distraction is always fun. Spent 20 minutes yesterday with Dan, finding a few leaks in GNOME. Dan navigated libumem and mdb and both of us navigated the code. Helped save many megabytes of heap in the panel. Yay! Lots of low hanging fruit for a pretty noticeable gain right across the desktop, and libumem (like valgrind I imagine) makes this heaps easier. Thanks Dan!

Indiana Update

With a few weeks to go to the OpenSolaris Summit, and hopefully not much longer before we get a first preview release of Indiana, I figured it would be a good time to write an update of where the project is and the great progress that has been made to date.

The Caiman folks have been tirelessly rocking away in the background making some pretty incredible progress. Dave recently posted an updated package list for the Slim Install project, which now has a prototype successfully booting at just over 500MB in size. Considering that they started from Solaris Express and 6 CDs worth of contents, this is excellent progress that Sanjay and the team have made and represents a very solid foundation to tweak over the coming months. David is doing a similarly awesome job identifying lists of components for a first pass at an eventual network repository. Jan posted a first draft of the target instantiation spec for Slim Install, with a focus on ZFS being the root file system initially.

Karen recently announced the source code repository of the Distribution Constructor project, based on much of the work that Dave has done with the Live Media project, and Moinak’s (and team) work on BeleniX. It’s pretty nice to see this all coming together, and I very much hope that it will be similar to Revisor in functionality. You can check out the current scripts here –

  hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/distro_constructor

Ethan is starting to ramp up the Snap Upgrade project, with his strawman proposal for management of the boot environment, and has outlined a schedule for the work. Awesome!

And of course work is continuing on the rest of the install infrastructure after the successful integration of the Dwarf Caiman thanks to Sarah and a heap of others (William, Sundar, Niall, Matt, Jedy, Frank) - despite the occasional hiccup from the cheap seats of the audience (no offense Eric!) :)

Stephen and Danek have proposed their image packaging system project to the Install community, and got the all clear to set up a webpage, mailing list and Mercurial repository. Hopefully we'll see some good things soon on this front - until then, the Indiana package management status page has more details, including links to various related blog posts.

Alan has been rocking on providing an open X stack with the FOX project, and the work of Moinak and Martin. Not only that, he's had time to work on integrating libXcursor so we can finally all have whizzy animated cursors! Laca has been tirelessly building the desktop stack with the new X libraries, and with the release of GNOME 2.20 this week, we're in exceptionally good shape.

Great work is still being done by John on the i18n emancipation and Jason on an unencumbered libdisasm for SPARC. All of which looks good for being able to provide a freely re-distributable download (and torrent!).

There are other projects continuing to make significant strides too numerous to mention here (xVM guys, congrats!). Check them out, they could use your help.

And so our attention turns to next month's summit, as Ben points out. Brian has been doing a great job pulling some of the proposed topics together, so we're all coming prepared. There's 65 people currently signed up for the two day event (13th and 14th October), and it will be an excellent opportunity to meet the people behind the project and brainstorm of the coming months.

You can be 66!

Update:Okay, Simon grabbed 66. You can be 67! You get the idea...

Feeling Decidedly Unchirpy

Pretty gutted to see Steve is leaving Sun. I’ll miss the guy a lot, and I’ve enjoyed working with him in Sun over the past couple of years. Best of luck dude in your new nest! They’ve hired a pretty awesome guy, and I’m sure you’re going to have a lot of fun there.

OpenSolaris Developer Summit

The first OpenSolaris Developer Summit has been announced for the weekend of 13th and 14th October at the University of California in Santa Cruz. It’ll be a pretty hands on summit, with a lot of discussion (hopefully) around putting together the bits of Indiana. It’ll also be a good excuse to party and get to know some faces behind the OpenSolaris project which I’m looking forward to – I’ve found with previous GNOME experiences, it’s the best way to get excited about where we’re heading for the project and putting a face to a name really helps communication wise too.

We haven’t yet got a solid schedule around, but there’s a mailing list set up and ready for discussion. We also have a small amount of travel sponsorships for non-Sun employees to be able to attend, so if you think you’d like to attend and have been active in the project thus far, please do apply. So go register! (oh, and save the world by car pooling down to the event if you can).

SUNW moves to JAVA

Red Hat’s reaction was to move to NYSE in response to the volatility of the NASDAQ. Sun changes brand. A while ago, Jonathan talked at an internal Solaris all hands where he talked about leadership, characterizing it under a single word, courage – courage to be honest and integral, courage to be innovative, courage to collaborate and courage to act with pace and react to market needs. Of course time will tell on whether this will be a successful move, but either way, I’m satisfied that Jonathan practices what he preaches and I’m massively supportive of that and his continuing leadership.