OpenSolaris Booth at OSCON
I worked the OpenSolaris booth at OSCON for several hours today. What a conference! I've really been missing out all these years.
This is the first year I've been able to attend, so I'm very glad it was in San Jose, CA. I managed to talk with about fifty attendees today and couldn't believe how well-known OpenSolaris has really become in such a short time. I suppose the OSCON crowd is far more keen on OpenSolaris than other audiences? 
Not really, but most have tried it!
That was what amazed me because when we started out, it was hard to find anyone at a FOSS conference who had tried opensolaris. Young and old have touched OpenSolaris now and a large number mentioned VirtualBox pretty early into our conversations. Go Liane! (Liane Praza is the mastermind engineer behind the OpenSolaris VirtualBox images distributed this year.
I talked with attendees about moving from S9 to opensolaris because we've largely preserved compatibility, I talked a lot about ZFS and live media and boot environments. Everybody has a copy running somewhere on some extra machine or virtual machine or partition. It was incredible to me because just 18 months ago people everywhere were almost completely unaware of OpenSolaris. Today made me feel that we're approaching a tipping point, half a million installs in about a year has set a very interesting stage. I certainly heard people saying that they have to know about OpenSolaris. I've been asking people the same question at conferences for four years have you tried opensolaris? and until today I hadn't heard people say of course.
