OpenSolaris and Linux, closer?

As I said on my previous post, I would like to see the lines that divides OpenSolaris and Linux, as blurred as possible (or deleted). Latest comments from Linus about the GPLv3 sounds promising, but even more promising is the response from Jonathan. So here we are, I now can see the day where Linux and Solaris can reach a common point.

Meanwhile, it seems that we can do better with our patch policy. Darren has already answered to the avahi issue, sometimes, is not as easy as Sun does not get it, but, some projects just don’t get it that API stability decisions does matters to avoid crappiness, bugginess and bronkeness in the long term.

I would also like to point out that, Inidiana is a binary distribution project inside the OpenSolaris.org community, and right now is anything but a discussion mailing list and a bunch of good ideas and intentions, so nothing to do with Gnome patches for Solaris and Solaris Express.

I’m leaving now to attend the monthly Irish Python User Group meeting.

Indiana thoughts and ideas

I do think that Indiana is a good idea. The reason because I think this is because I’m a strongly community guy, and I do think that a good healthy and friendly community is the most important assent to any free software project. And I do think that Indiana is probably the best effort to achieve that inside the OpenSolaris community. It tries to adress some issues and it has a name, an identity and a direction.

This excites me because I would like to see the days when hostility between OpenSolaris and the Linux community is over (at the same time I also think that the GPLv3 would be a huge step), but at the same time, making people from the most adopted UNIX-like operating system out there comfortable on OpenSolaris would be a huge step (for both projects and the whole free software community). Lots of old-school Solaris users are afraid of a GNU/OpenSolaris thing, and neither Indiana is a GNU/OpenSolaris effort nor all GNU tools are bad as evil. But a nice text help when you use "top" trying to help users to gather the same information they expect (something like what Ubuntu does now when you type a missing command) would help a lot of people.

And the same time, it tries to let others people to make their own flavors of OpenSolaris with a low entry barrier. This is another huge point in my opinion. The easier people is able to adapt OpenSolaris for their needs, the most problems it solves, and the most adoption it gets. There are also people complaining about having too many distributions would be harmful for OpenSolaris because people wouldn’t know which one to choose.

OpenSource is all about free of choice. And sure, choice have a pay, but from the mid 90’s we all know what the lack of choice have done to this industry. Poeple out there have really different ways of thinking, and really different problems, let them choose. And the most important thing, make easy fo r them to work on building their own tools from yours one.

All this thing of a more affordable OpenSolaris excites me, and what do I do when I excited about something? I just draw about it. Since this is a community effort, I won’t wait to anyone in Sun marketing to make a logo (sorry guys :P), so I’ve done my own:

Indiana was the name’s of Indiana Jones’ dog, and if I remember correctly, it was a Husky. The stripes is about american indian make up stripes. And the green letters, are a quite obvious easter egg. I think it needs more work, but depending on the feedback and the acceptance, I would work more on it and I will propose it as an official logo. By the way, Inkscape Powered!

P.S. Ian, you should be proud, this is the second official project with your name in it, let’s hope this one is at least as successful as the first one 😉

I’ve got a guitar, and I met God!

Pretty productive long weekend though, I had bank holidays yesterday and a friend of mine have visited me, so I showed her the city center, Grafton, Temple Bar et al.

On Sunday I finally found a music shop and, at last, after two months of abstinence since I moved to Ireland, I’ve got guitar again! It’s a Greg Bennet, I haven’t heard of that brand before, but I tried the guitar, and it was pretty solid and gentle. I also bought a pretty nice amp, small, but enough for my purposes.

Then, yesterday, since it stopped raning, we were able to go to St. Stephens Green and give a pleasant walk on Grafton Street while we attend some street musicians shows. Suddenly, I saw a black man, with a really familiar face to me. Oh my Morgan! It was Morgan Freeman! I told my friend, that I thought it was him, and she ran after him, trying not to be seen, and then, he realized (he’s god, he knows everything), and told her "Hi!", with a pretty funny smile from the other side of the street, like saying… "yes… it’s me…".

Pretty funny incident, isn’t it?

P.S. Sorry, no photos of the incident, you’ll need to trust me.

My thoughts on project Indiana

Finally, the project Indiana has been proposed.

It is kind of sad the huge amount of poisonous feedback and noise around the discussion, the people that thinks that the project is not so important, should just let the people who believes in it just work instead of trying to stop them.

I think that a community driven with community goals distribution can solve lots of problems to the community and would make the whole project more pleasant for newcomers and people that want to use OpenSolaris for their own purposes. The only idea excites me and I cannot wait to find a way to help to find a place in the project to be helpful.