Life is so good, it gets better every day

Thoughts on a probable opensolaris.com

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!

Logo Feedback

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?

NSA Joins OpenSolaris

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!

Could it get any worse?

The best bit about having a house right on the shores of Lake Dunstan is the ability to decide at 7pm to take the kayak out, grab a rod, and try fishing for an hour before the crew catering begins. The worst bit about being right besides the shores is the poor expectations you set yourself thinking it’s time to catch one of the buggers. After trying a variety of methods (spinning, trolling, fly) I’ve yet to see a rise. The kayak has worked out surprisingly well, though proves to have quite a fast drift – which is nice for covering a lot of ground, but an absolute pain having to paddle into the driving wind to start a new one. We’re here for another week and a bit – fingers crossed for better times ahead.

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!

OGB Reflux

It’s been a very difficult year for most of the OGB members. We came to the table having ratified the current constitution, trying to figure out where we fit in. While I think the OGB made some good positive progress in some areas, it also feels like we lost the ability to talk with our community and pro-actively work on a plan for growth and prosperity for our community. It would be so, so easy to walk away after a year…

But I’m not. Consistency and context of past discussions is hugely important for subsequent boards, and so far in the nomination process, Alan and I are it. I’ve always said that I’ve wanted to stay on at Sun because I think I can still add value. When that day comes when I can’t add that value, and there are other better experienced people around, I’ll leave. The OGB is no exception to that (though the current constitution states there’s a maximum of a 3 year period).

So I’m in. I’d probably give myself a C+/B- on last years performance, and I’m interested to improve that this year – on retrospect, being Secretary sucked a great amount of time and I’d like to move away from that role so I can focus on the discussion rather than trying to take notes.

There’s a couple of things I’d like to see happen next year –

• At least one face-to-face OGB meeting
• At least one face-to-face Sun/OGB meeting (and an option for other meetings with other corporate members – ideally we need to get towards an Advisory board )
• Defined focus areas for each of the OGB members, outside their normal duties
• Working group to start re-assessing the current constitution and figuring out what our community has grown into, and what changes to the constitution are needed to reflect that

Bio: Glynn Foster. Almost 30. Joined Sun in 2000, working on the GNOME project. Past GNOME Foundation Board Director, and current OGB member. Joined the Project Indiana team in 2007 and looking forward to focusing energies to product a first release OpenSolaris OS later this year.

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.

Food and data wrangling at the OK Corral

Jayne and I are down in central New Zealand, taking a little time out of our busy Wellington lives to help her brother Mike, and partner Inge, shoot a western, of the Pavlova variety. When we first got asked to help, I imagined both of us, sitting on the porch of some gold mining town, rocking in the chairs watching some stranger walk into town. Unfortunately our first movie roles would have to take a back seat for another while and we were propositioned to be part of the catering staff for the movie.

Jayne’s done a pretty phenomenal job pulling together the plans 3 weeks worth of food for our time here, with us putting out breakfast, lunch and dinner for a core crew of 18 people, and the occasional posse. It’s been pretty tough trying to find the variety to keep the hardest working crew with satisfied bellies, but we’re getting there, on our second week in. We’ve both lost our appetites, but the crew are liking what we’ve done so far.

I’ve also been data wrangling for them, copying the data off the camera cards onto multiple USB drives. It’s mostly been without a hitch, though did lose one filesystem (HFS+) due to some sort of weird super block error, and didn’t manage to fix it – I bet Apple are looking forward to using ZFS soon.

The shooting has gone really well, and I’ve had the fortune of being able to review most of the shots each evening. Matt put together a quick first cut for a few scenes during the weekend, and the result looked sensational.

We’re now down in Cromwell, housed beside Lake Dunstan, and have full wireless access – it’s been a good chance to catch up on work from the previous week, as Tekapo turned out to be a bit of a melon in terms of network access (though thanks to the lovely Jenny for sharing her house for a few days). It’s nearly 1am here, so time to hit the sack. MI Films coming to a cinema near you – Jayney’s already working on the marketing campaign!

OpenSolaris and GNOME Project days at FOSS.in

Just got to FOSS.in this morning to join in the fun during the OpenSolaris and GNOME project days there. Everyone’s pumped up about the conference and you can hear the din of people’s horns acknowledging that right across town. It promises to be a pretty excellent conference. I’m giving a talk this morning on The Secret diary of an OpenSolaris Hacker, aged 13 and 3/4 at 10am. I’ll be stepping through some of the development processes involved in contributing to the project, and helping explain how you can raise your profile in the community based on your contributions. Come join us!

Digital Future Summit

Day 2 at the Digital Summit. Hasn’t quite had the same fizz as yesterday morning, but enjoyable nonetheless. Didn’t think Cullen was half as good as Cunliffe. As usual, there’s some random babbling notes from today too.