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About Your Organization
1. What is your Organization's Name?
OpenSolaris
2. What is your Organization's Homepage?
http://www.opensolaris.org/
3. Describe your organization.
The OpenSolaris project is an open source project which was initially
based on the source code for the Solaris operating system. It is a
community development effort, providing a forum to collaborate and
improve operating system technology. The community has grown from
its original roots in Sun Microsystems to be part of a much wider
community, incorporating a wider set of interests and ideas, to
where it is today, a diverse community of people from many different
backgrounds, right across the world contributing to the project.
The governance constitution details the OpenSolaris community
organizational structure as a whole,
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/governance/,
loosely described as a set of community groups growing up around
a set of projects and technologies, each formed by various
participants, contributors and core contributors (or members),
working under the guidance of the OpenSolaris Governing Board.
The community has well over 20,000 officially registered
participants, spread over 40+ community groups, and 50+ user
groups worldwide. OpenSolaris also has several distributions
derived from the base operating system, including Nexenta,
Belenix, and Solaris Express. The number of people contributing
code is still relatively small due to some infrastructural
barriers in moving the source code management system out behind
Sun walls. We have made significant progress in this over the
last year, and the beta program for a fully read/write Mercurial
repository available is nearing the end.
4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do
you hope to gain by participating?
This program specifically focuses on students getting involved in the
mentoring organizations, and gives the opportunity for the student to
learn about the organization, and the code. More importantly, through
out the student's involvement in the program, the barriers to entry
are tested out. This is hugely important for just about every open
source community and providing this opportunity through GSoC allows
the OpenSolaris community to learn where the hurdles are, an opportunity
for the mentors to learn how to interact with people who are not as
familiar with the development processes as they guide them through their
own project.
OpenSolaris also recognizes that the students today are the core
contributors of tomorrow and there is some very obvious benefits for
bringing new blood into the project.
5. Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please
summarize your involvement and the sucesses and failures of your student
projects. (optional)
OpenSolaris had two projects accepted for GSoC 2006. The projects worked
well but in one case the community as a whole could have helped the
student more. While we probably won't use the exact implementation of
the project the student used (the project has shown us that that approach
wasn't quite correct) we will be implementing similar functionality.
This I believe was partly due to the OpenSolaris community itself still
being quite young at the time. The other project is still on going and
the student is working well with the project team.
6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you
applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)
N/A.
7. What license does your project use?
Various. The core OS and networking part of OpenSolaris is mostly
a mix of CDDL and BSD. The layered software such as Xorg uses the
same license as Xorg does, similarly for the JDS/GNOME desktop it
uses the same licenses as the rest of GNOME (ie GPL and LGPL).
8. URL for your ideas page
We have a small selection of possible project ideas for a student
to pick up. However we would encourage students to submit other
ideas based on their own initiative and imagination -
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/summerofcode/projects/
9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
The OpenSolaris community is spread out over a number of smaller
communities and projects, thus choosing a single mailing list
would be difficult. We intend to use the newly created
summerofcode at opensolaris dot org as a primary forum for contact between
our mentors and students, providing them with the necessary pointers
to information and resources to complete their project.
A full list of mailing lists is available at -
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo
10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?
irc.freenode.net, #opensolaris
11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to
see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)
No.
12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their
Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization
will not become active until they respond. (optional)
Glynn Foster <glynn dot foster at sun dot com>
Emily Chen <emily dot chen at sun dot com>
About Your Mentors
1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please
be as specific as possible.
Our community very much relies on the voluntary nature of all contributions
so as such there was no formal criteria. However, where possible, mentors
will be selected as masters of their given field, so that they can provide
the best advice to their student through the duration of their project. If
other experience is required, the mentor will help get the student in
contact with other community members or groups to answer their questions.
2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address
separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each
mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)
We don't have a formal list of mentors officially decided yet, as we
believe the mentor list should change depending on the student
applications that are accepted. We currently have 26 members on our
summerofcode at opensolaris dot org mailing list who can step up to the plate
as appropriate based on the final student project field.
About The Program
1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
A reasonable attempt will be given to get in touch with disappearing
students and to assess any change in background that might have caused
this. If, after reasonable attempts, the student can still not be
contacted, the project will be declared as orphaned that may be
adopted by other contributors to the project. The mentor will do a
short write up, sending to the organization administrator who will then
contract Google.
We hope, however, that the opportunity to work with skilled and
experienced Mentors on bleeding edge technology in a diverse community
will help motivate the student to continue to completion.
2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
Each mentor will be selected so that they are experienced and knowledgeable
in a particular field that the students have proposed with their project. If
a mentor suddenly can't dedicate the time required for the program, they
will be encouraged to contact the organization administrator so that an
alternate mentor can be selected. While we hope that a mentor can be involved
right throughout the duration of the student project, we hope that the
student will get involved within a particular community group so that the
mentor is not the only contact that a given student would have.
3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your
project's community before, during and after the program?
We have set up a mailing list for the student to interact with their
mentor during the duration of the program. While we encourage the
student to discuss directly with the community, we understand that this
can sometimes feel like an intimidating atmosphere. We also encourage
all Mentors to work closely with their students to encourage them along
the way. As well as this, the student will be given the opportunity to
host their code on opensolaris.org, and have their blog feeds be aggregated
on planet.opensolaris.org.
4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the
project after GSoC concludes?
We hope contributing to the project will be a rewarding and fun
experience, and enough to continue to want to be connected when the
program has ended. We also understand the time commitment needed to
be involved in an open source community, and the pressures that students
have each year with their day-to-day university work and examinations.
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