[OSUNIX-dev] News July - post OSCON

["C. Bergström"]

Greetings,

It's been a long time since the last update.  Regretfully, on the core 
technical side of things not a lot has moved.  However, on the legal, 
non-profit, community and toolchain side of things OSUNIX has made big 
steps...

Legal/non-profit
-------------------------------------
Background/History
The license compatibility between CDDL, GPLv2 and various other issues 
has been in question for a while.  One of my goals has always been to 
take the OSUNIX project and community as high as possible.  My vision 
revolves around both fund raising and community building.  Sometimes a 
community needs a catalyst of more than stories and social fabric.  We 
need sponsors who are able to help pay for things like travel, beer and 
resources.  For months OSUNIX has been blocked from joining any current 
non-profit open source organization.  The most receptive and transparent 
has so far been SPI [1].  Unfortunately, in July we were removed from 
the agenda because of miscommunication revolving once again around this 
licensing issue.  At that point I contacted SFLC to help us directly.  I 
had the chance at OSCON to sit down with one of their lawyers and the 
outcome was in my non-lawyer opinion was very positive.  While many 
things are not official I'm optimistic of a few things..

    * OSUNIX will soon join or form a non-profit
    * OSUNIX will soon have some level of official legal representation
    * Confusion about CDDL libc + GPLv2 is significantly reduced
    * Fund raising for important catalyst projects will start

First fund raiser..

I'm trying to finalize the details and budget, but I mildly optimistic 
my company will do a matching sponsorship of up to $5000 to get us 
started.  My goal for the proceeds will be entirely focused on 
enterprise/solaris features that compete with IPS.  Myself and others 
strongly believe adding features to existing mature open source projects 
is the best long term goal.  Most of the planning around this is done, 
but we've needed help doing the python coding.  It's time to give this 
project a kick in the butt :)


Community
-------------------------------------
Canonical has really spent a lot of time, money and energy into building 
the Ubuntu community.  While they focus on different markets I plan to 
study this more and hopefully spur similar growth.  For me this starts 
with a question.. What would be the impact if an international group of 
engineers and developers that care about high quality software were all 
collaborating, sharing and working together?  Many people care about 
open source and the spirit behind it.  At the same time it's arguable 
that sometimes decisions in FOSS are made without the structures of 
planning and engineering.  How could ZFS or the storage community grow 
faster if all the development and planning was transparent?  I'm hoping 
there are more people out there interested in not only asking questions, 
but helping to discover the answers.

Toolchain
-------------------------------------
A lot of progress has been made to plan and refactor out nearly all the 
closed parts of OpenSolaris.  From the two parts still outstanding the 
toolchain (compiler) has been by far the most time consuming.  Many will 
argue that GCC should just be the defacto choice, but it really doesn't 
solve a number of critical problems.

    * Quality of code generated as compared to Sun Studio compilers
    * Guaranteed support and testing for OSUNIX/OpenSolaris/Solaris

What it does provide is a very high level of robustness due to the 
targeting of open source developers using it.  Since roughly January of 
this year I've worked with others on porting Open64 to OpenSolaris and 
comparing a multitude of technical and engineering aspects for all open 
source compilers.  I can't say much, but what I can say not under NDA is 
that I'm optimistic that before the end of summer a resolution and plan 
will be announced.


OSCON
-------------------------------------
John Plocher was kind enough to give the Introduction to OSUNIX 
lightening talk.  Slides should be available soon.  Outside of the other 
TODO items I was able to get resolved I did a lot of great networking at 
the communityleadshipsummit and surrounding BOF's.  From a personal 
perspective I now really /get/ some key parts of why the Ubuntu 
community is growing so fast.


Questions/thoughts/feedback:
-------------------------------------

If we are going to form a new non-profit we'll need help from people in 
the community

    * Is anyone interested to be on the board of a non-profit technocracy?

    * Core people involved in OpenSuSE have been thinking of forming a 
non-profit.. Is it in our benefit or should we make the effort to work 
together on this?  (Technical aspects would still be entirely outside of 
this)

    * Suggestions on any other significant open source projects we could 
maybe work with?

    * Does anyone know any *really* good Python developers who are 
interested in working for pay on smart package manager/pkgcore?


There are some seriously influential leaders and decision makers on this 
list.  Free free to trim this post and start an open conversation or 
share a story (good or bad)..


Regards,

./Christopher (codestr0m)



[1] http://www.spi-inc.org/ (Software in the Public Interest - 
non-profit open source umbrella org)