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February 2006 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter

Overview

In February, the OpenSolaris Charter was approved by Sun and the Community Advisory Board, the OpenSolaris Community started ramping up on the formation of development projects, more source and binary technology was released, a variety of contributions continue to be offered, some external code contributions have led to ARC cases, and source code management conversations are increasing. February was a short month but a busy one nonetheless.

This newsletter attempts to offer a snapshot of the OpenSolaris Program and what's going on within the community. Because the project is large and diverse, we realize we can't capture everything in every issue. We are considering adding some new categories to the newsletter --- such as a "Community & Project Highlights" section, where one group would have some space to talk about any important development; an "Anecdote of the Month" section, where a community member could tell a brief personal story about some issue or experience; and a "Conferences" section, where community members can talk about their travels to various events around the world. If there are areas in which you feel you'd like to contribute to this publication, please feel free to suggest them. You can talk to us on the program-team mail list or the opensolaris-discuss mail list.


Community Status


OpenSolaris Governing Board

On Wednesday February 8th, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board voted to approve the OpenSolaris Charter. Two days later, Sun Microsystems also approved the Charter, and the document was signed by Glenn Weinberg, vice president of Sun's Operating Platforms Group. The OpenSolaris Charter enfranchises the "OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) to manage and direct an OpenSolaris community in its efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSolaris, so that the community may long endure." The current CAB members now comprise the initial OGB, and their first order of business is to create the OpenSolaris Constitution. These governance conversations have already begun, and the documents will be written, debated, iterated, and ratified in the open --- just as the Charter was developed in the open. OpenSolaris community members are encouraged to comment on any governance-related matter on the OGB's list.


Projects & Communities

OpenSolaris currently has 38 communities and 7 projects, with new communities and projects being discussed and proposed regularly on the mail lists. During the first few months of OpenSolaris, mostly communities formed. Now that the site has support for projects, however, most of the activity is around the formation of development projects. This trend is expected to continue. In February, one new community and five new projects were opened:

Projects approved for future opening include: Key Management Framework, Resource Management, Solaris on zSeries Mainframe Servers, and /usr/ sfw Nevada. Communities approved for future opening include: Packaging, Installation, and Distribution. Several additional communities have been proposed but are not yet approved.


Contributions

Our goal is to highlight a variety of contributions that community members are offering. Here are some contributions this month:

  • Three ON code contributions (here, here, here) were integrated in February. Note that the most recent one was code for an RFE that required ARC approval. This is our first ARC approval for an external contribution --- congratulations to Rich Lowe for the contribution and to Dan Price for his sponsorship.
  • At the end of the month, a total of 37 contributions had been integrated, three were awaiting sponsors, and 24 had sponsors and were in progress. A total of 89 request-sponsor contributions have been offered since launch. Full details on these code contributions are in the request-sponsor report.
  • Two other ARC cases are in progress related to external code contributions: one about pools submitted by Robert Milkowski and one about a tty lock program submitted by Rich Teer. Both are being sponsored by Darren Moffat. A table will be created next month to track ARC cases like the request-sponsor report tracks code contributions. Also next month, the materials associated with these cases will be published in the ARC community.
  • An article about getting started with OpenSolaris using VMWare was contributed to the Content Project by Bill Rushmore. It can be viewed on the Articles page. Ignacio Marambio Catán is in the process of translating several articles into Spanish and plans to make those documents available to the community. Several additional content contributions have been proposed as well.
Conversations
  • In February, conversations on the 96 Jive discussion forums topped the 2.3 million views mark since the project opened. The forums have also garnered just under a million unique visitors since launch.
  • In an effort to help community members keep up with who's talking about what across a wide variety of OpenSolaris communities and projects, Eric Boutilier has created a series of mail-list "roll up reports," which are like meta-digests. The reports were prompted by the expansion of new communities and projects on opensolaris.org (each of which have their own mail list forum) and the growth of forum traffic in general. The typical way to follow a forum is to periodically scan the header of every new post. The digests make this more efficient by providing a periodic (e.g. bi-weekly), condensed snapshot highlighting three things: (1) original posts made by lead members, (2) the size of each thread (topic popularity), and (3) who was posting and how much, and of those, which ones are community/project leaders. The digests are being posted on the opensolaris-discuss forum and on the web at del.icio.us. Use this link for an RSS feed.

User Groups
Conferences

OSBC, February 14th: Because the Open Source Business Conference is not a developer gathering, OpenSolaris didn't have a significant presence there. However, Sun sent several executives, and OpenSolaris was discussed in multiple conversations. Jonathan Schwartz delivered the opening keynote, and Tim Bray and Bill Vass participated on several panels. Jim Grisanzio attended the conference and posted some photos.

FOSDEM, February 25th and 26th: FOSDEM, on the other hand, is a free software developer gathering, and OpenSolaris did have a presence. Jonathan Haslam held a tutorial and gave a talk on DTrace, and both were very well attended. Stuart Kreitman and Jay Dobson attended the Xorg track and both gave talks.


Education

A guide for using OpenSolaris within operating system classes was produced by Michelle Olsen for presentation at SIGCSE (Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education) 2006 event. The document is available for download here.


Technical Status


New Components

  • Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) Build 33 was available for download on February 14th.
  • The latest ON source drop available is an interim snapshot of what will be Build 35. Please visit the ON Downloads Page to download.
  • The Development Tools consolidation (DevPro) made two components available this month. Source for the system math library was made available on February 22nd. Binaries for the microtasking library were made available on February 28th.
  • The Xen Project released its first source code snapshot on February 13th.

SCM Work

The preliminary evaluation phase for distributed SCM candidates ended on February 17th. Reports were submitted on multiple candidates, and discussion continues on multiple threads on the tools-discuss email alias: Monotone, Mercurial, and Bazaar. The next step is to try to eliminate some candidates to reduce the list. Once finalists are identified in early March, in-depth evaluation of those candidates will proceed.


OpenSolaris Community Statistics

For a variety of recent OpenSolaris statistics and graphics --- including downloads, registered community members, referring domains, etc --- please refer to the Community Metrics Page, which is updated every two weeks by the Marketing Community. The presentation of the format is under review, all input is welcome. Community growth is stable at approximately 130 new members per week, and this is accompanied by increased volumes of other community activity.


February's Newsletter Contributors

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