The OpenSolaris
community in Japan came together in Tokyo tonight to celebrate the launch of
OpenSolaris 2008.11. Shoji Haraguchi, Hiroaki Nozaki, Akira Ohsone,
and Hisayoshi Kato all presented
talks about the community and the new technology in 2008.11.
The room was packed with 85 people,
so it was a very cool night. Actually, it was pretty hot in there.
You know, I've been watching Sun Japan's OpenSolaris community
development programs grow consistently over the past two years. The
operations span globalization, marketing, sales/service, and
engineering. There is a Japanese OpenSolaris User Group (Japanese
language), a Tokyo OpenSolaris User Group (English language), an
OpenSolaris Night Seminar Program, an OpenSolaris Source Code Study
Group, customer/partner interactions, installfests, university
engagements with 10 Campus Ambassadors, and other events that such as
Tech Days, Developer Lounges, etc.
And the OpenSolaris community is growing right along with Sun Japan's
increased participation. The community is also starting to mix with the
international Linux, BSD, and Tokyo2Point0 communities, which is very
cool because local community development can now extend globally. And
real contributions are coming in too: translations of content,
generation of original content, source code (some of which has been
integrated), presentations, technical articles, packages, and mirrors.
In fact, the community is advancing to the point where significant
stuff is just showing up seemingly out of nowhere -- such as the new
Japanese OpenSolaris book and the new Japanese distribution of
OpenSolaris. That last point is important. When we started OpenSolaris,
we tried to learn from the open source community and build a global
program that would encourage others to contribute without Sun having to
drive everything.
So, congratulations to the Sun team driving this launch of OpenSolaris
2008.11.
One more point: the Japanese may not say much in English about their
participation in the community, and there are some well known cultural
reasons for this. There is actually a great deal of community content
to be found in Japanese language blogs, but even then it's not
characterized as westerners are used to. It's different and usually
indirect. And yes, this drives me mad. But if you want to really know
about about this you have to dig. Deeply. You have to take the time.
And if you do, you generally find significant activity generating some
very interesting contributions. I'm just scratching the surface here, I
realize, but there is more here than meets the eye.
