Tomorrow morning I will be flying to Bilbao for attending the "I Jornadas de Software Libre y Empresa" (a business focused conference held by the Deusto University) where I will be giving a talk on OpenSolaris: history, motivation, technologies, development model, and some of the upcoming projects.

If you are attending: I will bring a few OpenSolaris starter kits and t-shirts that I will give away after the talk. Stay tuned if you want one. :-)

Since a joined the Indiana mailing list quite a lot of interesting things have happened. The first thing that, I have to admit, has surprised me is the amount of topics that have been discussed in such a short period of time. People are really passionate about the project!

I suppose it is mainly because the projects aims to improve one of the aspects in which Solaris needs an update. Even if it is rock solid and it includes many cool tools never seen before, it needs some love in other aspects; for instance, it comes to my mind the packaging system and the installer.

So, as you could expect, such a huge project is generating also big discussions; some of them are supported by technical points, others are simply based on previous experiences or personal preferences.

There has been a thread that has captured my attention the most: the distribution name. What began as something funny got more and more interesting while we were talking about it.

The discussion was focussed on how the distribution should be named. There were many different opinion: there were people who proposed to call it 'Indiana' as the project codename, other people looked for new names: 'Luna', for instance; and there are people - like me - who encouraged the adoption of 'OpenSolaris' as the distribution name.

There is a big bunch of reasons for naming the binary reference distribution (which is what Indiana is going to be) after the source code it comes from, which was named after the community that supports it.

The basic idea after the proposal is to try to not to confuse people. OpenSolaris (the community) maintains OpenSolaris (the Operating System) that has a binary reference: OpenSolaris (the distribution).

It might be more obvious with an example: instead of using "the GNU/Linux system packaged by the Fedora community", you would use "OpenSolaris".

There is one problem though. It remains unclear how the community could use the OpenSolaris name because of the trademark (that Sun owns). Anyway, I don't think that it is going to be a big problem since Sara is taking care of it, so I'd expect it to be sorted out soon.

My take. I'm definitely supportive of naming the reference distribution after the system. I am pretty sure we would be making a mistake if we called it something else. Let's try to keep it simple! Without any kind of doubt, my vote goes for calling the distribution OpenSolaris.

The OpenSolaris community does deserve to own the distribution based on their code named after it.