Mono, gcj, java, c++, what?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: Dan Ritter [mailto:dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org]
>  
> oh, and the community imploded like a popped balloon.
> 
> http://wiki.genunix.org:8080/wiki/index.php/2010_08_23_OGB_Agenda#Minut
> es
> 
> Other than that, no changes. No sirree. None at all.

Depends on what you call "the community."

Opensolaris is the opensource fork of solaris, intended to become (or
largely contribute to) the next solaris.  The intent of creating osol was to
reduce cost of product development, and create an attractive introduction
for newcomers and administrators who wish to keep current.  There have been
some people such as myself, active in the community, exactly as planned -
admins who started with osol as an introduction and used that experience to
guide corporate purchasing decisions.  Since osol is free, more modern than
sol10, and unsupported, over time the community became mostly comprised of
home users, laptop users, general non-enterprise users.  As a result,
opensolaris began developing for general purpose commodity hardware and
laptops, which undermines the business principles behind the existence of
the operating system.

The community began vocally hating on oracle before oracle had actually done
anything to offend them.  When the 2010.03 release was late ... even before
it was late ... people were saying things like "they're destroying solaris"
and "why would anyone ever want to pay for solaris" and "why would anyone
ever buy support - just buy supermicro" and stuff like that.  News articles
(many of them) were written based on rumors in the osol community.  The
community began to actually *hurt* the public image of solaris, rather than
promote it.

I don't blame oracle for disbanding the Opensolaris Governing Board (OGB)
and taking back control of the community.  I think the OGB was largely
ineffective at fostering a community of advocates and enthusiasts.

I think it's a positive thing that they're discontinuing opensolaris, and
replacing it with solaris express, because the community-driven opensolaris
strayed too far from the business ideals of solaris.  Too many people were
running an operating system on their laptops, that was meant for servers.