Tim Foster's Weblog

There's lots of traffic about the Indiana project on opensolaris.org at the moment - just about every opensolaris mailing list seems to have been copied on a recent email: seriously guys - get a room!

One of the complaints that is being made about the project, is the notion of it being "Sun derived" rather than "community derived". This argument is nonsense imho.

Belenix was "Moinak derived", Schillix was "Schilling derived" - I have absolutely no problem with Sun starting work on a distribution and setting an initial technical direction. A project has to start somewhere.

I have every faith that the folks starting the project will do the work on that distribution in the open, that the project mailing lists will reside on opensolaris.org and that lots of good will come of it. I also believe that if anyone genuinely wants to help, their assistance will be appreciated.

Now, if the community don't like the technical direction of the project, don't end up using the finished product (or even pre-alpha build!), then that's fine: the project will wither and no harm will have been done. If they do like it and think that it has value, maybe then, and only then, could the discussions start about it possibly becoming a reference distribution for OpenSolaris. It's really early days yet - let's see some bits first.

What I do object to, is people slowing things down, getting in the way and particularly damping enthusiasm - which is a rare commodity in my experience. Oh and (nearly most of all) crossposting - just stop it!