Murdock's Project Indiana Goes Public

After a variety of speculations and ideas what Ian Murdock may be doing with Solaris for "Project Indiana", Glynn Foster has finally delivered some solid facts in a mailing list post. The goal of Sun's Project Indiana is to create an OpenSolaris binary distribution that is community driven. The hopes for this binary distribution is that it will increase the Solaris user-base and mind-share through providing easy access to Solaris/OpenSolaris technology.

Similar to Ubuntu and Fedora, this new OpenSolaris distribution will see a six month release cycle. While Project Indiana has been operating behind closed doors, the intention is that this binary distribution will be a community grass-roots project but will be head by Ian Murdock himself. One of Ian's priorities for this new distribution is to have a reliable package management system (as he described during JavaOne 2007). Ultimately it looks like they are trying to make OpenSolaris so that can be easily installed and used by all interested parties and to some extent copying some of the Linux successes.

More information along with the live discussion (where there are some heated arguments) can be read here. Expect more information on Project Indiana shortly.