For the last several months, I've been involved with the Blastwave project. This project produces high-performance, high-quality Solaris packaged open source software. As many packages as possible are compiled using the Sun One compiler suite, and many packages include both 32- and 64-bit libraries and binaries. The packages aim to provide the best out-of-box experience to the end user, with little or no post-installation configuration required. Some of you may have heard of this project; some may be using these packages right now. It's the ideal way to get open source software like Gnome 2.6.2 and KDE 3.3.1 up and running on everything from Solaris 8 through to 10, on both SPARC and x86 processors (with AMD64 support on the way). In fact, there are currently 878 packages available from Blastwave. Packages are available via a package management utility, pkg-get, which is much like the Debian Linux apt-get utility. This makes it easy to update existing packages, or find new packages to install. A much better alternative is to receive all of the packages on a single DVD! The single DVD is available for USD$20, with a monthly subscription service available for 20% of the single DVD cost.

So, now that I'm done with the sales pitch -- what's all this about an S.O.S?!? Well, this project has so much momentum at the moment on the community side, but next to no momentum on the financial side. The project's founder, Dennis Clarke, has footed the bill up to this point -- that includes server space for the build farm, bandwidth for synchronizing mirror sites, bandwidth for the web page, and up-front costs for production and shipping of the DVDs (not to mention the labor). At this point, the project accounts are dry, there are a scant 30 DVD subscriptions to date, and there have been no offers of corporate support or sponsorship! Some of the maintainers have managed to scrounge up servers to support update and maintenance of the build farm and supporting servers, but that's just part of the solution. For more background info, please read this thread on comp.unix.solaris started by Blastwave maintainer Mark Round.

So my plea is this -- if you use Blastwave, please buy a DVD, or better yet get a subscription. Save yourself the time spent downloading! If you are part of a company (or own a company) that is powered by Blastwave, please consider lending the project a hand through corporate sponsorship. The project has come so far, and achieved so much that it would be a disaster to lose it all. Please support Blastwave and Solaris Open Source software!