Last
December, I had the opportunity to email the creators of the three
new distributions of OpenSolaris that have been released so far. When
I asked them why they decided to create their distributions using
OpenSolaris, I got some interesting answers.
Alex
Ross is one of the creators of Nexenta, a GNU-based OS based on the
OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. Alex said he chose Solaris for “its security, battle-hardened
stability, scalability, reliability and availability in Fortune 2000
enterprises, where Solaris is still a king.” Good answer, Alex!
Moinak
Ghosh, creator of BeleniX, wanted to create “an open, easy-to-use, LiveCD distribution”
for the Indian market and felt “a distribution made from scratch
out of India would capture more attention in the local community.”
As far as he knows, there had never been an OS distribution created
from scratch in India. Local Linux variants exist but were not
created locally, he believes. (Disclosure: Moinak is an engineer for
Sun in India but this is an extracurricular project.)
And
Joerg Schilling created SchilliX because he is a teacher at a technical institute in Berlin. He said, “Students
currently learn based on Linux and thus learn less good things than
they could learn with Solaris.” He
wanted “to demonstrate that it is possible to create a useful
distribution from the first set of sources from OpenSolaris.”
Amazingly, SchilliX was first released on June 17, so I guess we should say happy birthday to SchilliX, too.
I
know Sun really appreciates the support of people like Alex, Moinak
and Joerg. They are fine examples of the participation age in action.