OpenSolaris CAB

Sun have announced the members of the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board.

It looks good. Solid. Professional. Nothing too flashy. Basically, I trust these people.

And I can claim to have met two of them, even. Casper briefly at a Solaris 10 meeting over a year ago, and Rich in a former life of his through SunService here in the UK.

Simon Phipps has talked about the process the CAB is going to go through. This is uncharted territory, and these guys are going to steer us through it.

I think Sun have done well with a difficult balancing act. Clearly, as the foundation for Solaris, there needs to be some measure of control by Sun on the way that OpenSolaris develops. And yet they are absolutely committed to opening up. In fact, many people I know are really concerned that Sun are giving up too much control and that the core values of Solaris will suffer. I don't think that will happen - most of the Solaris and OpenSolaris community have the same values, and so the mainstream OpenSolaris will keep many of those values. Meanwhile, there will undoubtedly be criticism from outside that Sun have chosen the majority of the CAB and the community members are pretty partisan too. And that's fair enough. But, remember: OpenSolaris is open source, and anybody is free to take it and set up a project of their own outside of the CAB's governance if they so choose.