Re: About Project Indiana

As promised:

Ok, so Project Indiana has caused a bit of a stir both internally at Sun
and externally... It wasn't meant to come out quite this way (and the
timing was particularly bad, given that I've been consumed with
JavaOne all week and haven't been able to respond till today). Look
on the bright side though--the tech world's abuzz about Solaris!

Bottom line, this could have been communicated better, but we
honestly didn't expect the interest level to ramp up this quickly
(again, a GREAT thing, don't forget that!). My fault, so let
me put it right and tell you what Project Indiana is (and isn't).

First of all, as Marc said, Project Indiana is more of a concept than
anything else. Importantly, there's not an army of engineers working
away in a back room somewhere on a top secret project that's just going
to be dumped on you, take it or leave it. The key decisions have yet
to be made, and we want this community to be a big part of making them.

There ARE people working on parts of the overall problem we're hoping
to solve, at Sun and in the community too. Indiana is not meant to be a
replacement for these projects, but rather a project that brings them
all together with integration as the key goal. You know, like a distro..

Yes, Project Indiana refers to a binary distro of OpenSolaris
that Sun plans to build in the OpenSolaris community in full
community view, and with full community participation.. I.e.,
this is not Sun sticking the community brand on a Sun product,
it's Sun making an additional contribution to the community. We'll
be going by the book here and plan to begin the formal
process of creating the community/project (as appropriate) shortly.

Think of this as the next natural step in the open
sourcing of Solaris that began in 2005. In other words, the source
has been in the community for a while, and now we're moving the
binary version and related machinery into the community too. Why?
Because even in open source, it's the binaries that people want.
Furthermore, we're not presenting OpenSolaris as crisply as we could
be.. In particular, people familiar with how Linux works (and that's A LOT
of people) hear the name "OpenSolaris", assume it's the community
version of Solaris, and are confused to find out that isn't actually true.

This is actually just one part of what I've been referring to as
"the familiarity problem" (formerly known as "the usability gap" until I
realized that "usability" was relative). I.e., that while Solaris has
compelling technology, that technology remains somewhat inaccessible to
users that are familiar with the Linux environment (and, again, that's
a BIG market). Addressing the familiarity problem is another
big goal of the Indiana project. In other words, the goal is to make
what Solaris has to offer available to the larger market
that by and large is more familiar with Linux as things stand today.

That said, even as we aggressively move to make Solaris more familiar to
Linux users, we will be equally aggressive in pushing Solaris'
unique features to the fore--i.e., to the extent that Solaris
starts to look like a distro to solve the familiarity
problem, it's not "yet another Linux", but a _better Solaris_.

Note that this doesn't mean we'll be doing a brain transplant and just
sticking the Linux userland on top of the Solaris kernel. First of all,
as anyone who has spent any time actually talking to me about this
knows, I'm a huge believer in the importance of backward compatibility
in Solaris. Even as we're moving forward with major change,
we must ensure that this major change does not mean a major break
between past, present and future. That would violate one of
the fundamental promises--and competitive advantages--of Solaris.

This also doesn't mean if you're an existing Solaris user and don't see
anything wrong with the current userland that we're going to take it
away from you. One of the compelling technologies, after all, is Zones..

So, what will be the big features in Indiana? You tell me--and,
indeed, a discussion of features could be a great way to actually
get off on the right foot here given the somewhat rocky start so
far.. My list: packaging, installation, GNU userland alongside
"Solaris classic userland", and laptop support (see what
I mean that there are already people working on these things?).

The big feature from my point of view though is the 6 mo. timed release
cycle. Timed release cycles have done wonders to introduce predictability
into other open source projects (e.g., Gnome, Ubuntu). And 6 mos. is the
clear winner in terms of frequency among Linux community/developer
distros--it's just enough time to do interesting work
AND have a reasonably long hardening period so the thing is stable.

That's it for now. I hope I've given you all something to think about. :-)
I'm running on fumes.. Will check in again tomorrow.

-ian
-- 
Ian Murdock
650-331-9324
http://ianmurdock.com/

"Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige