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March 2007 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter



Overview

Mach was a massive month for website registration growth, web forum conversations growth, the election of the new governing board, and the ratification of the community constitution. It was certainly one of the most active months in the history of OpenSolaris.

Quote of the Month

"For the target market, we believe Sun has done a fine job of making itself pertinent again to a market segment that a few scant years past would have likely dismissed the notion of Solaris and Sun altogether." -- New OpenSolaris distribution for developers, The Register, 3/9/07.

News Summaries

  • Although Sun started to distribute the OpenSolaris Starter Kit in late February, March brought brought thousands of orders and new registrations. By the end of March, there were about 41,000 people registered on opensolaris.org -- which represents a doubling of the total registrations on the site in just one month.
  • March was also a big month for traffic to the 188 OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums (access the forums here or here). The community broke four records for total web views (1,718,699), unique visitors (1,530,201), threads (2,104), and messages (8,243). For more data on the OpenSolaris Community, see the community metrics page from Patrick Finch in the Marketing Community.
  • The OpenSolaris Community went to the polls in March and elected a new OpenSolaris Governing Board. Eighteen candidates ran for seven seats. Congratulations to the new board members: James Carlson, Alan Coopersmith, Casper Dik, Glynn Foster, Stephen Lau, Rich Teer, and Keith M Wesolowski. Also, a word of thanks to the original CAB/OGB that created the OpenSolaris Charter and Constitution in the first place: Casper Dik, Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Simon Phipps, and Rich Teer, and also to the governance working group members, Stephen Hahn, Keith Wesolowski, and Ben Rockwood. Part of the election process this month involved the ratification of the OpenSolaris Constitution and a test poll ranking the community's priorities. The new OGB will have regular meetings, publishes minutes, and holds open conversations on their new list, ogb-discuss (subscribe to the list and view/post via the web forum).
  • Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, joined Sun's Solaris organization in late March.
  • Glynn Foster published his weekly news updates: March 4, March 12, March 19, March 26. And Eric Boutilier published his list activity reports: full archive on del.icio.us. Both Glynn's and Eric's publications offer a unique look into activity within the OpenSolaris Community.

Conferences

  • OpenSolaris Day at Tech Days, Kuala Lumpur was held on March 6th with 123 attendees. There was a lot of discussion around licensing, community activities, and the system giveaway.  For more information and presentations, go to the Kuala Lumpur events page.
  • OpenSolaris Day at Tech Days, London was held on March 13th. This event was held at the beautiful Central Hall Westminster. This agenda had a new session that Simon Phipps presented, "The Zen of Free". For more information and presentations, go to the London events page.
  • OpenSolaris Day at Tech Days, Paris was held on March 19th at the Espace Grande Arche. The welcome session started with approximately 80 people and finished up the day with a community presentation from Ken Tomlinson and Bruno Bonfils. For information and presentations, go to the Paris events page.
  • OpenSolaris also participated in the China Software Innovation Summit in Beijing. Conference presentations and photos can be found here and here.

User Groups

There were about a dozen user group meetings in March. The Irish OpenSolaris User Group held their 7th meeting with Tim Foster presenting "An Introduction on OpenSolaris" and Fintan Ryan talking about building, installing, and BFUing.  The Front Range OpenSolaris User Group also met in March to hear about "Sharsmgr" from Doug McCallum. And the CZOSUG meeting was based on Moinak Ghosh's & Vineeth Pillai's visit in Prague. Moinak presented his favorite topic -- Livemedia and Vineeth continued with presentation about BrandZ.

New Projects and Communities

New projects continue to open on OpenSolaris with eight coming online in March:

And 10 new projects were proposed: Fault Management Event Registry, Java kstats; Summer of Code, User Mode Driver, NFSv4 namespace extension; Mozilla DTrace project, NFS Server in Local Zones, Kernel Sockets, Pluggable Sockets, and Next Generation Webstack. Currently, there are 81projects on OpenSolaris with another 30 or so in the planning stages.

Technical Status

Website

    • Entries in the category drop-down re-done to show the true Bugster product/category (solaris/c++) with plan text description information next to each one (e.g., solaris/c++ (Solaris Libraries)).
    • State field has plain text description next to it (e.g., State: 5-Cause Known (Bug is root caused)).
    • Responsible Engineer field displays multi-part names correctly.
Contributions to Consolidation Code
  • There was one code contribution put back into OpenSolaris in March, bringing the total to 151.
  • Thanks to Rich Lowe for the ON bug fix. And thanks to the ON Sun engineer Steve Lau for sponsoring the code through to putback.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report



March'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.