“I need to ask the Blastwave and OpenSolaris communities for your help. Despite my best efforts at gathering corporate sponsorship, Blastwave is once again in a financial crisis. We are due to be evicted from the datacenter in three days, and there is little that I can do personally to stop this.” You can help out by donating, and while doing that you can also participate in this survey set up to estimate the size of the Blastwave community.
and what does it have to do with the OpenSolaris community?
Go to balstwave.org. Read the links in the article and the answer shall be revealed to you.
Blaswave is, in short, is a community supported repository of open source software packages compiled for Solaris with a apt-get like interface.
Thaaaat way, we will have a single source of software.
I think there’s something more going on here than meets the eye. I understand spending waking hours working on Open source software, etc., but selling your house to keep a site going?
I don’t know the guy and he undoubtedly has done a lot to the community, but how could someone have made such a drastic move?
(And yes, Sun could’ve sponsored him, but that’s not my point).
For sure, his friends should be holding him an intervention at that point.
Sun, sitting on their pile of cash, believing in all things Open, doesn’t want to lift a finger to help out?
Say it ain’t so..
Yea… but Sun’s money isn’t a renewable resource *drum crash*.
I really likes blastwave’s packages… it’s something that many Solaris users as me has been waiting for..
I think that i’ll offer some broadband and disk space.. this project relly rocks!! Why will be kafut??
Why does a little site need a datacenter presence – I can get my friends at 25 different ISPs to give me a little space.
Especially if I give them something, like a banner ad?
This seems a little fishy to me – like take the donations and run kind of fishy.
I’ve built some packages for Blastwave and the main reason for the datacenter prescence is to have central development systems. That have 3 (I think) main systems. One is the frontend box, one Solaris SPARC dev box, and one Solaris x86 dev box. Package maintainers are required to make packages on each platform. They are then moved to the web server system.
pkginfo | grep CSW
Don’t worry – help is on the way.
I must say I’m heartened by the fact that this post comes from a machine in Sun’s IP space.
OrgName: Sun Microsystems, Inc
OrgID: SUN
Address: 4150 Network Circle
City: Santa Clara
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95054
Country: US
NetRange: 192.18.0.0 – 192.18.194.255
NetName: SUN1
NetHandle: NET-192-18-0-0-1
Parent: NET-192-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS2.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS7.SUN.COM
NameServer: NS8.SUN.COM
RegDate: 1985-09-09
Updated: 2003-10-10
Mind you, it could just as easily be a starry-eyed intern as someone who controls any purse strings or knows of Sun’s intentions on the matter.
I never understood the fanatism of certain people. I agree Solaris is a great Operating System but why would people allow supporting it get in the way of their life? If supporting it gets in the way of you finding work, why do it? If you have to sell your house to keep a website going, why? In the end of the day, you get nothing for keeping Solaris alive. Solaris is Sun’s property. Sun makes money off of it. You don’t get anything out of it except the warm fuzzy feeling. Work on it if you want, but don’t let it ruin your life. If Blastwave goes down, so what? It’s Sun’s lose. They have plenty of money, they can keep it going. Why give everything you have to support them?
You know, blastwave is a godsend. The first thing I do when deploying a Solaris server is install a bunch of blastwave.org packages to make the system bearable. Sun should be hosting this project.
Sun should host Blastwave in their datacenters. Blastwave is needed for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, because it is a very effective and efficient tool for installing binaries for a lot of software.
It would be a really cheap marketing boost for Sun to take Blastwave under their wing and bill it under “community development.”
Many big Open Source Projects get much, much money because people using this projects software see a value in it.
But the Open Source things from Sun are not “real” Open Source. Yes, you get the code and the binaries and you can use it but there is always a closed side on them. Look at OpenSolaris: You need first to install a closed SW to get a minimal system -OpenSolaris- compiled and installed.
Or look at OpenOffice: Only Sun’s devs can develop on it because it is so big and cluttered that no one can enter development(also a way of closing it;M$ could tomorrow also open up their code repos and no one could enter development of this code because it is to much,too big).
I never heard of such difficulties from a “real” Open Source Project, because they tell the truth not as Sun.
“I never heard of such difficulties from a “real” Open Source Project…”
LOL! You obviously haven’t tried to get your foot in the door at Mozilla, the BSD systems, GNOME, the Linux kernel, etc. These projects are _huge_ and operate implicitly on a system of meritocracy. No one can just waltz onto their mailing lists and ask for help and expect more than a trivial acknowledgement.
They are too busy to hand hold new developers–you gotta learn it on your own…just like OO.org. My impression of OO.org is that they will at least pay attention to you if you really did the up-front work to make their attention worth while. The problem is that these projects are so complex that the up-front work is like prepping for a new career.
Sorry guys…i use sunfreeware.
Where is the smiling pumpkin logo ?
Hahahahaha
This guys needs to have his PRIORITY checked out.
I would never sell my house for open source!
Considering I’ve been dealing with Solaris servers for near a decade and never heard of them…
I’d say their problem is publicity…
I’m with Matt Giacomini on this one… Blastwave? Isn’t he a decepticon or something?
They are the best option if you want a fairly up to date gnome desktop for example.
Very good packages.
Too bad really.
What is this guy doing trying to host this thing out of his house er apartment maybe now. you can get multiple gigabyte bandwidth with a dedicated server for 300 a month easy. This guy sounds really fishy….
I really like blastwave.org and I like to spend a few $. But it would be nice to know where they will spend the money in detail?
servers, backup tapes, disks, ram, support, bandwith, men power etc. — where will the money go?
I think the guy whose asking wants to get a paycheck for his open source work. It would be better if he got a job and kept his freetime project in his freetime.
How much of this is related to Blastware, the PowerPC port of OpenSolaris? Dennis Clarke is the founder and (apprently) primary source of funding for both projects.
I’m not sure how someone could start such an ambitious project knowing they were already in financial difficulty.
http://www.blastware.org/
Now we just need commodity PowerPC systems from someone other than Genesi and this will be useful.