Cypros Telephony

A day like every other day. I start reading my email and again have to digg through tons of messages arriving via social or business networks suggesting cooperation on this or that. Most of them in broken english. Most of them from people whose native language is one of the languages listed in my profile. Another case of not done homework. If you want to contact me, wouldn’t it be basic good manners to check out my profile and see if you could write me a proper email in one of the languages you and I know best ? Wouldn’t it also save both of us a lot of time if you would first check out my corporate website to see if I am at all in your line of business or maybe a competitor or maybe for sure not interested at all ? Doesn’t it cross your mind that by not doing that you tend to create an initial opinion in my mind that you are just too lazy to do that and do not value my time at all ?

Strange.

So you have setup your Solaris/SXCE/SXDE/Indiana system and ran into problems. YAY there are irc channels to help. Just login to freenode and join #opensolaris #solaris or any of the language specific channels and start torturing people with questions. Oh, you get attacked and laughed at ? Now go figure …

The problem is easy. SUN, as strange as it tends to behave sometimes has put into public access tons and tons and tons of documentation. This documentation is available to everybody with a webbrowser and sometimes some patience at http://docs.sun.com/ . People will attack you or laugh at you if you did not even put any effort into reading up and solvin the problem yourself at all.

There is a simple reason for that. Close to everybody in those channels is working day in day out with the systems and trying to make his living administrating, developing with, on or in those systems. We all spent tons of our time working out things, reading documentation, attending training etc and we just can’t understand why it seems to be so hard for people to first use SUN’s excellent documentation site, than use google and only as a matter of last ressort torture people on the irc channels with their problems.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK before asking on irc, or you make life hard for the people that have really tricky problems and search for answes there, since they will also have to get through the opnion that they did not do their homework.

Just my 2c EUR, as usual …

Someone on IRC #opensolaris just pointed me to this ==> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/trademark-policy-dev/2008-February/000559.html

which is the first sane comment I have seen on the whole discussion. DO we want to keep the community and keep it in coop with SUN and discuss things, or do we want to cerate a nice little warzone that will create nothing but bad blood, staying in for yeas and not letting anybody work on the project without having to take sides ? I think the answer is clear and John seems to me the first person to say it short and sweet. Of course this is just my personal opinion

Motion to the Board: Proposed Community Group Creation

Summary
The OpenSolaris community could profit a lot from a new Community Group
that would coordinate and organize the multitude of efforts to port
software to the OpenSolaris Platform, without actually changing their
scopes or behaviors, but creating a central space where any interested
party can find each and all needed so he can port software, port
drivers, find ported software etc ..

Scope
The proposed Software Porters Community Group shall be the group that
coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of
Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform. This is
neither a proposal for a new packaging system, nor for a new collection
of software (therefore it neither is something like blastwave, nor in
its core the same like the migration community suggestion which both
want to work on specific ways of porting/packaging). Its a proposal to
create a community of porters, advocates and advisors that will help
people who want to port software, advise them, create documentation and
maintain links and resources about the many different places you can
find information and ported software. This will be handled in a way
that shall be independent of religion and politics regarding amongst
others the way packages are done o if sunstudio or gcc are the better
way to do things.

The OpenSolaris Software Porters Community will actively work to
collect from all the other projects involved in porting software (like
desktop for example) all information regarding their work and be the
central point of information regarding all things porting and ported
software to OpenSolaris.org.
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