OpenSolaris

About Your Organization

1. What is your Organization's Name?

 OpenSolaris

2. What is your Organization's Homepage?

http://www.opensolaris.org/

3. Describe your organization.

 The OpenSolaris project is an open source project which was initially based on the source code for the Solaris operating system. It is a community development effort, providing a forum to collaborate and improve operating system technology. The community has grown from its original roots in Sun Microsystems to be part of a much wider community, incorporating a wider set of interests and ideas, to where it is today, a diverse community of people from many different backgrounds, right across the world contributing to the project.

 The governance constitution details the OpenSolaris community organizational structure as a whole, http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/governance/, loosely described as a set of community groups growing up around a set of projects and technologies, each formed by various participants, contributors and core contributors (or members), working under the guidance of the OpenSolaris Governing Board.
 The community has well over 20,000 officially registered participants, spread over 40+ community groups, and 50+ user groups worldwide. OpenSolaris also has several distributions derived from the base operating system, including Nexenta, Belenix, and Solaris Express. The number of people contributing code is still relatively small due to some infrastructural barriers in moving the source code management system out behind Sun walls. We have made significant progress in this over the last year, and the beta program for a fully read/write Mercurial repository available is nearing the end.

4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

 This program specifically focuses on students getting involved in the mentoring organizations, and gives the opportunity for the student to learn about the organization, and the code. More importantly, through out the student's involvement in the program, the barriers to entry are tested out. This is hugely important for just about every open source community and providing this opportunity through GSoC allows the OpenSolaris community to learn where the hurdles are, an opportunity for the mentors to learn how to interact with people who are not as familiar with the development processes as they guide them through their own project.

 OpenSolaris also recognizes that the students today are the core contributors of tomorrow and there is some very obvious benefits for bringing new blood into the project.

5. Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the sucesses and failures of your student projects. (optional)

 OpenSolaris had two projects accepted for GSoC 2006. The projects worked well but in one case the community as a whole could have helped the student more. While we probably won't use the exact implementation of the project the student used (the project has shown us that that approach wasn't quite correct) we will be implementing similar functionality. This I believe was partly due to the OpenSolaris community itself still being quite young at the time. The other project is still on going and the student is working well with the project team.

6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)

 N/A.

7. What license does your project use?

 Various. The core OS and networking part of OpenSolaris is mostly a mix of CDDL and BSD. The layered software such as Xorg uses the same license as Xorg does, similarly for the JDS/GNOME desktop it uses the same licenses as the rest of GNOME (ie GPL and LGPL).

8. URL for your ideas page

 We have a small selection of possible project ideas for a student to pick up. However we would encourage students to submit other ideas based on their own initiative and imagination - http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/summerofcode/projects/

9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

 The OpenSolaris community is spread out over a number of smaller communities and projects, thus choosing a single mailing list would be difficult. We intend to use the newly created summerofcode@opensolaris.org as a primary forum for contact between our mentors and students, providing them with the necessary pointers to information and resources to complete their project.

 A full list of mailing lists is available at - http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo

10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

 irc.freenode.net, #opensolaris

11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)

 No.

12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)

 Glynn Foster <glynn dot foster at sun dot com>

 Emily Chen <emily dot chen at sun dot com>

About Your Mentors

1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

 Our community very much relies on the voluntary nature of all contributions so as such there was no formal criteria. However, where possible, mentors will be selected as masters of their given field, so that they can provide the best advice to their student through the duration of their project. If other experience is required, the mentor will help get the student in contact with other community members or groups to answer their questions.

2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)

 We don't have a formal list of mentors officially decided yet, as we believe the mentor list should change depending on the student applications that are accepted. We currently have 26 members on our summerofcode@opensolaris.org mailing list who can step up to the plate as appropriate based on the final student project field.

About The Program

1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

 A reasonable attempt will be given to get in touch with disappearing students and to assess any change in background that might have caused this. If, after reasonable attempts, the student can still not be contacted, the project will be declared as orphaned that may be adopted by other contributors to the project. The mentor will do a short write up, sending to the organization administrator who will then contract Google.

 We hope, however, that the opportunity to work with skilled and experienced Mentors on bleeding edge technology in a diverse community will help motivate the student to continue to completion.

2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

 Each mentor will be selected so that they are experienced and knowledgeable in a particular field that the students have proposed with their project. If a mentor suddenly can't dedicate the time required for the program, they will be encouraged to contact the organization administrator so that an alternate mentor can be selected. While we hope that a mentor can be involved right throughout the duration of the student project, we hope that the student will get involved within a particular community group so that the mentor is not the only contact that a given student would have.

3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

 We have set up a mailing list for the student to interact with their mentor during the duration of the program. While we encourage the student to discuss directly with the community, we understand that this can sometimes feel like an intimidating atmosphere. We also encourage all Mentors to work closely with their students to encourage them along the way. As well as this, the student will be given the opportunity to host their code on opensolaris.org, and have their blog feeds be aggregated on planet.opensolaris.org.

4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

 We hope contributing to the project will be a rewarding and fun experience, and enough to continue to want to be connected when the program has ended. We also understand the time commitment needed to be involved in an open source community, and the pressures that students have each year with their day-to-day university work and examinations.