I just listened in on the call for the OpenSolaris (Indiana) community strategy planning meeting to get a bit of an idea where the OS is going. It seems that the road map includes a number of nice bits for the planned 2008.11 release. Some much needed work on the performance of pkg and PackageManager, an update to Gnome and a move to more open development and rudimentary SPARC support.
The Development plan included things like a planned move to a Mercurial repository for the beginning of August from the current SCM. The plans have the goal of eventually having non Sun community members able to make putbacks.
The repository system was described in more detail including how pkg.sun.com and pkg.opensolaris.org related. From my (fairly limited!) understanding it appears that pkg.sun.com will be where the Sun supported releases will live as well as encumbered, paid and other resources that are not going to be generally available in the same way or under the same licences as OpenSolaris itself. pkg.opensolaris.org will continue to be where the bleeding edge stuff lives, and will have a quick release cycle to conincide roughly with SXCE (bi-weekly builds). There will also be a stable version availble from pkg.opensolaris.org and there was mention of a proposed /contrib repositery for Open Source software from the community - if this means community maitained projects like songbird, beta builds of software or others things is not clear to me at the moment. Slides for this talk given by Tim Cramer and Dan Roberts are hear.
Stephen Hahn went into further detail about the way IPS works and the slides he used includes some nice information on the clever bits of IPS like bandwidth efficiency (when updating packages only get individual files needed) and publication safety (packages with incomplete dependencies denied published state).
Dave Miner talked about the Automated Installation (with the some SPARC support) in preview form hopefully making an appearance in the 2008.11 release. Which should make deployment on a larger scale an easier task. Other features like Solaris 10 co-existence (without jumping through hoops) and proper Zones support in the BE management side of things is also due. More details in his slides.
There was some further discussion about hardware compatibility and the HCL list being out of date, at which point I discovered that the Device Driver Utility has the ability to upload your machines specifications to the bigadmin HCL list.
The use of Sun Ray was also mentioned, with OpenSolaris having a nicer desktop experience than Solaris 10 the ability to get Sun Ray working might help with the adoption of Sun Ray as it can provide a more modern environment to the end user. It looks like this work is underway though no time estimations where mentioned.
Overall I got the impression that the people behind OpenSolaris are trying hard to push both usage and adoption as well as trying to fix some of the shortcomings of Solaris to make it more attractive to the Web 2.0 companies, the hobbyists as well as the Enterprise users. It's not there yet but I can see it coming, exciting times to be rejoining Sun!
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