Tim Foster's Weblog

There's lots of traffic on ogb-discuss at the moment - both for and against the sentiment issued in Sun's responses to the OpenSolaris Trademark Questions.

As always, the excellent John Plocher has responded to several mails with a carefully considered post, which expresses how I feel about the whole thing particularly well - an excerpt:

As with any change, there are unanswered questions, uncertain futures, and activities that may become more difficult. There will also be opportunities and benefits that hopefully will outweigh those downsides.

If only we'd stop shooting ourselves in the feet.

John's original post is here.

I want to see more OpenSolaris distributions running on everybody's computers: helping to solve the trademark issue by collaborating on the Trademark usage and branding guidelines, along with resolving the parking lot items will let us progress towards that goal.

For the record, I'm still happy that Indiana is being called "OpenSolaris" not because it came from SMI, but because it looks like it's in the best position right now to get more people using computers running on the OpenSolaris codebase - if other distributions can match, or hopefully exceed that in the future, then the de-facto distribution will no longer be OpenSolaris, it'll be that distribution instead, whatever it's called.

Ultimately, I'm happy to let the users vote with their feet.