Thursday Oct 9th 2008, NLOSUG met again. Some 25 people (80% non SUN) gathered at SUN Microsystems Nederland headquarters to learn about the OpenSolaris Image Package System, to discuss OpenSolaris non-technical issues and concerns and to get an overview of the most interesting and alive OpenSolaris projects.
It was an honour to have Bart Smaalders, Senior Staff Engineer, present on Image Package System. Bart has been involved with Solaris for many years and is busy with many, many different things. He gave a great talk on IPS, its background, the design principles, future plans... his preso can be found on the NLOSUG website.
After the break, we did what we called the NLOSUG CORE Refresh. Some of the people who started NLOSUG in October 2006 stepped back (thanks Casper Dik, Menno Lageman, Remco Fugers!) and others were added to the CORE. We now have 8 people, 4 non-SUN and equally distributed over ATOS, EDS, Arvin Meritor and SIDN, 4 SUN and equally divided over SUN presales, SUNs ISV Engineering team, Solaris Engineering and the local Systems Practice.
Next, Marcel Knol, Managing Partner at iunxi B.V. and a frequent NLOSUG attendee presented on "OpenSolaris, non-technical" issues. Marcel took a great angle: he played the devil's advocate and came up with all kinds of nasty questions that made people really think. Why is SUN doing OpenSolaris? We're still 10 years behind Linux, so why bother? What is OpenSolaris anyways and what purpose does it serve for Sun? Interesting to notice was that the vast majority of reactions came from the SUN people in the room... kinda like the "don't touch my baby" syndrome.
After Marcel's talk, Joep Vesseur gave an overview of current OpenSolaris projects and showed a demo of Solaris Fastboot. Really impressive to see boot time (the time between the word "halted" is printed and the banner showing up) shrink from about 2 minutes to less than 20 seconds!
Although I had prepared some slides explaining the different Solaris releases, codenames and distributions, we stopped the meeting. Reasons: it was 10:45pm and we had snacks and drinks waiting! So the Networking part started and at 00:10 I left the building together woth the last visitor.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that again, we did use our "meeting.central" solution and had people join remotely... and this time it worked like a charm 
Please have a look at the next planned NLOSUG on the NLOSUG website meetings and join!