February 2007 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter

Overview

In February, the OpenSolaris Community was busy participating at user groups and conferences around the world, opening projects and portals, contributing code, and finalizing plans for the first OpenSolaris election to select a new governing board and ratify the community governance. Also, right at the end of the month, Sun launched a new program to distribute OpenSolaris Starter Kits to community members around the world.

Quote of the Month

"Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's server products, said the 'open-sourcing of Solaris' changed Intel's mind about the OS ... [h]e noted that Intel has always been a strong proponent of open source, and applauded recent moves by Sun to make Solaris and Java open source. 'This is a new environment where there [is] a very large Solaris installed base that's moving toward open source.'"

- 1/23/07, ZDNet Asia, Intel: Open source drew us to Solaris

NEW: Free OpenSolaris Starter Kits!

Sun is now taking orders for the OpenSolaris Starter Kit. Sign up and get a free kit delivered to you in most regions around the world. You can help spread the word about the OpenSolaris Starter Kit with free Starter Kit banner ads, and you can get involved in the Starter Kit Project on opensolaris.org as well.

Community News

News Summaries

Glynn Foster's weekly news updates: Feb. 6th, Feb. 13th, Feb. 19th, Feb. 27th.
Eric Boutilier's mail list activity reports: Feb 13th, Feb. 22nd.
OGB Election and Governance Ratification: In March, the community will elect a new OpenSolaris Governing Board and ratify the OpenSolaris Governance. The governance is already approved by Sun. See the OGB Election page for more information.

Jive Discussion Forum Data

The OpenSolaris community broke two new records on the Jive discussion forums in February with 1,143,699 total hits and 979,986 unique visitors. Threads came in at 1,793 and messages at 7,427. The 181 forums remain the most popular pages on opensolaris.org. For more community metrics, see the Marketing Community.

Projects & Communities

The Japanese OpenSolaris Community opened their portal in February at http://jp.opensolaris.org/. This represents the first country portal on opensolaris.org. You can get involved by signing up on the discussions page and help with translations. The Japan portal is part of the OpenSolaris Country Portal Project, which is an effort to translate the content on opensolaris.org into as many languages as possible. Press coverage of the announcement can be found at Enterprise Watch, Yomiuri Online, Japan ZDNet, and Open Tech Press.
5 projects were opened in February: Availability Suite; Emancipation; Xfce desktop; Printable Many Page Solaris Manuals; TPM/TCG;
6 new projects were proposed in February: Honeycomb; Xfce desktop; libc_i18n.a rewrite (emancipation); TPM/TCG; Enable/Enhance Solaris support for Intel Platforms; and /usr/gnu
OpenSolaris now has 74 open projects with another 19 that are approved but not yet opened.

Conferences:

The OpenSolaris Community participated in a several conferences in February, including OpenSolaris Day in Hyderabad, India, FOSDEM (here, here), and the First OpenSolaris Developer Conference in Berlin, Germany (photos here, here, here, here page for updates and future conference activity.

Contributions to Consolidation Code

There were 6 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris in February, bringing the total to 150.
Thanks to Juergen Keil, John Sonnenschein, Rich Lowe and Dan Sinclair for the ON bug fixes. And thanks to the ON Sun engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Artem Kachitchkine, Frank Batschulat, Steve lau and Bill Kucharski.
You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report

User Groups

There were many OpenSolaris User Group meetings in February: LOSUG, CHOSUG, ATLOSUG, IEOSUG, CZOSUG, GOSUG, BOSUG, FROSUG, SVOSUG. Most user groups post presentations, and even audio and video in some cases, on their community sites, but many presentations are also posted on the Talks and Presentations page. An OpenSolaris community presentation template is also available for community use. There are now 48 OpenSolaris user groups.

Technical Status

SCM Work: General

New target dates were determined for SCM work:

End of beta for Mercurial support on the site is targeted for early March.
ON Consolidation moving to Mercurial is targeted for mid-June.
ON Consolidation live source repository available is targeted for end of June.

A request was sent to SCM volunteers asking for help putting together training materials.

Website

Improvements to bugs.opensolaris.org went live on Feb. 26th.

February's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Eric Boutilier, Bonnie Corwin, Jim Grisanzio, Linda Bernal
How to Contribute: The OpenSolaris Newsletter is a community effort, and all community members are welcome to participate. Simply send news items to program-team mail list. The editor will keep track of contributions and list the names of participants in each issue. Also, the editorial team is always looking for feedback on the content and format of the newsletter, so please feel free to suggest changes.