Thursday, April 07, 2005

Sun VP Tom Goguen Discusses Evolution of OpenSolaris

So Tom Goguen was interviewed about OpenSolaris.

OK, so I thought I would take some of the questions and give some brief answers of my own:

LinuxInsider: What expertise do the Advisory Board members bring to the OpenSolaris initiative?

It's sort of difficult to answer this. We're heading out into uncharted territory, but I think we've got a good mix here. A Solaris insider, a Sun open source advocate, and a couple of community members of wide experience and great enthusiasm. I think it's the variety of expertise that's important - we really don't know how opensolaris is going to develop, and exactly what the role of the CAB is, so we'll just have to get some smart guys and see how it plays out.

My own view here is that Roy Fielding is going to play a crucial role in defining the character of the CAB and, by extension, the operation of the OpenSolaris community.

LinuxInsider: Do you see strong community support behind OpenSolaris initiative today?

Oh yes. And I'm surprised how varied it is. We have the usual suspects from the Solaris community, but also significant and active involvement from outside the traditional Solaris base.

LinuxInsider: Analysts have said of one of the hurdles that the Advisory Board will face is making it easier for developers with a computer science background and no prior Solaris coding experience to actually do a Solaris build. How will you get over that hurdle?

I would like to know which analysts said this sort of thing, because doing a Solaris build is easy. Plenty of pilot members successfully built and installed OpenSolaris as soon as we got our hands on the code.

I don't have any particular Solaris coding experience either. Having worked with bits of the code, I've found it very easy to understand what's going on and to make modifications. There's a lot of code here, though, and it takes a little while to work out how the whole fits together. But that's true of getting to grips with any piece of source you're not familiar with.

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