[csw-maintainers] An idea: OpenCSW on FLOSS Weekly

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

Do you guys know the FLOSS Weekly podcast[1]?

It's a well established (close to 150 episodes) podcast about
free/libre and open source software.  Each week, a whole 1h episode is
devoted to a specific open source project.

There's an episode about OpenSolaris[2] (I think I already mentioned
it on the mailing list).  You can listen to an episode or two to get a
feel what is the podcast like.  On each show, there is at least the
host and a co-host, so there are two or more interviewers.  There are
usually 2 people from the presented project, I think there is a couple
shows with 3 people, but it's rare.  Interviews usually include things
like what's the project about, project's history, who are the
developers, who are the users, collaboration with other open source
projects, plus a dose of whatever comes up in the conversation.
There's also the weird "emacs or vi?" question.  The interviews are
pretty lively, both Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz are very nice and
chatty.  There are also other co-hosts appearing, such as Jono Bacon.

Interviews are done live over VC (I've heard it's skype), in audio and
video.  No travel involved.

I thought that we could prepare and delegate two people from our
project to talk about OpenCSW.  There is quite a long list of upcoming
guests[3].  As of today, they are booked until March, so we could
potentially get on the show in a reasonable timeframe.

The show makers say (you can see that at the bottom of [3]) that the
best way to get a project on the show, is get a submission / request
from project leader(s).  I think that if they got an e-mail from us,
we would get a time slot pretty quickly.  The FLOSS Weekly guys
already did a number of shows dedicated to software distributions and
OS-related projects: FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, ZFS, and CentOS.  We are
one of the projects that make life on Solaris 10 bearable, and we
provide something not that far away from a fully fledged distribution,
so we might be interesting enough to get on the show.

Ideas for topics:
- what our base system, Solaris (9, 10), is
- why OpenCSW is important
  - we make open source software easily available on a commercial platform
  - we bring GNU userland to Solaris: grep which understands -r, and
sed which understands -i
  - we provide up to date software (compared to the companion CD)
  - we respond to specific package requests
- Package installation tools (pkgutil, pkg-get)
- Porting software to Solaris
  - wrestling with different build systems - this would be a good
opportunity to tell a little bit about them, as FLOSS Weekly featured
scons and waf enthusiasts in the past.  We could point out a couple
things that upstream developers should think about, such as library
linking, rpaths, custom prefixes, etc.
- Our package build system (does all the right things with
autotools-driven packages)
- Solaris zones, and Solaris sparse zones support

Any other ideas?

We need to be prepared to answer the following questions:
- how many users (give an estimate)
- what kinds of users do we have (individual / corporate / institutions)
- the size of the developer community
- how to get involved / where to find us
- good to give some metrics such as numbers of updated packages per month / year

We would need 2 or 3 people to speak on the show.

Would any of you see yourselves as potential guests on FLOSS Weekly?
I understand that people might be shy to volunteer on the list, so
it's also okay if you answer off-list.  I will follow up on the
mailing list in a couple days.

If you can think of another person that would be good to appear on the
show, send them an e-mail, or respond to this thread.

Maciej

[1] http://twit.tv/FLOSS
[2] http://twit.tv/floss75
[3] http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/pub?key=pYAJMbVobYCTro_z4LGo3ZQ
(anonymous read-only access)