OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB) members announced!

As many of you know, Sun is planning to release the source code to Solaris under an OSI-approved license, called the CDDL. To aid them in this process, they have announced that a Community Advisory Board (CAB) will be put in place. The CAB will initially have five members: two nominated from the OpenSolaris pilot project, two Sun employees, and a fifth person who is prominent in the Open Source community, appointed by Sun. Although it was formed a few weeks ago, the members of the CAB have so far remained anonymous.

Although Jonathan Schwartz will officially announce the identities of the CAB members soon, Sun's OpenSolaris Director, Avril Dummkopf, has given me permission to post their names here (I am a member of the OpenSolaris pilot, and have been since day one).

With no further ado, the CAB are:

• Marshall Kirk McKusick (OpenSolaris pilot member)
  
• Eric S Raymond (OpenSolaris pilot member)
  
• Andy Tucker (Sun employee)
  
• Bryan Cantrill (Sun employee)
  
• Linus Torvolds (Linux's head honcho)
  

Marshall is of course one of the chief architects of the BSD OS, and ESR is well known by many for writing the New Hacker's Dictionary, and The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The appointment of Andy and Bryan, being senior members of the Solaris kernel team, comes as no surprise.

I emailed Linus about him accepting a position on the CAB; apparently he did it because he wanted to see what Solaris was really like, having recently been quoted as branding it "a joke". My guess is that he also wanted to see which bits would be easiest to "borrow". RMS (Richard Stallman) was also in line for the fifth position, but apparently he felt his time would be better spent taking singing lessons...

Congrats to the new CAB, and I for one look forward to seeing the fruits of your labours!