Planet Solaris

A couple of people noticed that I’d created Planet Solaris. In particular Robert Milkowski wonders if Planet Sun and Planet Solaris will merge.

At the moment I’ve no plans to merge the sites - they are intended to serve different purposes. Planet Sun is an aggregation of the weblogs of Sun employees. The only criteria to being included is that you work for Sun.

I’ll confess that Planet Sun has far too many articles for me to read these days, especially given that some of the content lies outside my areas of interest. This was one of things that caused me to create filtered planets so that I could read about Solaris. It’s an experiment that works to some extent.

After reading about the OpenSolaris bloggers in Jim Grisanzio’s blog, I started to subscribe to their feeds. After adding half a dozen it became obvious that other people would probably want to read the same set of feeds, so I created Planet Solaris. The intention is to gather weblogs from people who are working on or talking about Solaris whether they are employed by Sun or not. The current subscription list is split roughly 50:50 between staff and non-staff, which seems like a pretty good start.

So, if you write about Solaris in your blog and would like to be included in Planet Solaris, drop me an email. Every post doesn’t need to be about Solaris - it’s okay to talk about your cat, Linux, etc. Unlike Planet Sun there is no automatic inclusion for Sun employees using blogs.sun.com - you have to send me mail just like everyone else :-)

In anticipation of being asked about an “editorial policy”, I’ll say that I don’t really want to have one. That said, if one of the subscribed feeds contains material that I suspect might get me in trouble as the aggregator then I’ll yank it. Similarly for content that I consider particularly offensive. The rules are the same as for Planet Sun and, if it’s any guide, I’ve never removed a feed or article for this reason. I work for Sun, so if you are a keen conspiracy theorist you might suspect that I’ll nobble anti-Sun or anti-Solaris content. This isn’t the case. The equipment used to provide the two services is not owned by Sun and is run using co-location facilities provided by a generous non-Sun employee friend.