My Experiments with OpenSource Kumar Abhishek's Weblog

The first (and a billion dollar) question every time my audience would ask me after a Solaris demo is that "If OpenSolaris" is so good and feature-loaded as you showed us, and if it comes free, then why is a proprietary OS, which is not so feature-loaded, hangs every 5th minute, crashes more often than waves on the shore and not to mention, pricey and expensive, so popular and widely used?" And to answer this I tell them how in the early age of computers and OS market, they played a smart game, and with their OS being made available on the most popular hardware there where most of the programmers wrote software which would run on their OS and this way after sometime because most of the Software were running only on their OS, we had more people buying only it (this time even after having a choice). This spiral effect made the "above mentioned OS" so popular. The second reason is, not many people know about OSes like OpenSolaris and its features as they have never ever seen, in their life, any other opening in the walls apart from windows (which has strong and thick iron rods, and a dark glass on top of it). So they never realize that their "sentence" in the prison of proprietary software is very much "self imposed"!

But now as the times are changing, and OSes like OpenSolaris have become equally (might be even more) user-friendly and support thousands of applications catering to almost every productive need, I guess its the right time to take Solaris to the users of tomorrow, the kids!

For what does a 11 year old, school going kid use a computer? Mostly for playing some games, play some music, writing notes and assignments, might be for browsing the Internet, use some education aids and read some electronic study materials. Applications to support all these run very well on OpenSolaris. There are many open source projects in the area of educational aids are running, and we can always work to port them on OpenSolaris, that is, if they are not yet ported.

One more positive aspect of migrating to OpenSolaris on the young students would give those parents, who are worried because of their child playing excessive violent games on their computers, a reason to feel good, as these games are not well supported on OpenSolaris. The secure structure where kids can be given a system with controlled execution rights would also ensure that kids do not spoil or infect their systems and yet get enough room to explore and experiment with their box!

With kids using open source OSes like OpenSolaris and growing up with open source technologies like OpenOffice.org it is very likely that in the long run, we will have grown-ups who would be very affectionate to Open Source Movement and would in turn become valuable members of the Open Source community. So I think, we should gather some resources and make a well directed effort towards making OpenSolaris the "OS for your Kids Computer"!!