Introducing the GoOSe Project

Recently I blogged about how some friends and I were talking about what it would take to rebuild an enterprise Linux project. We started researching what we would need and we got started. The result? The GoOSe Project.

What is the GoOSe project? It is a community rebuild of an enterprise Linux distribution based in the USA. But it is also more than that. The GoOSe project is more importantly a practice in building an Open Source community. We wanted to practice what we preach about how best to build a community. It just so happens that the product that this practice produces is a Linux distro.

Why "GoOSe"?

The name of the project was just a bit of riffing done on IRC(look around 20:03.38). We have quite a bit done as far as getting things rebuilt and have some ideas as to how we want to run this community. We have an ethos. A Koji instance running our builds. And we are just about done with the Buildroot needed to make a fully functional system bootstrap.

The GoOSe project is "in progress" to getting the first build out. We are currently just about done with the first step which is to compile all the upstream packages into a buildroot we can use to compile our packages. A more detailed status update will be blogged about later.

Why another rebuild project?

As I mentioned above, community is the hard part. And although there are various other projects similar to ours, we think we can fill a certain niche.

The centOS project for example is probably the biggest rebuild project out there and it caters to those who are looking for a 100% drop-in replacement for the upstream Linux distribution. Scientific Linux is built as a base for supporting computing clusters and experiments.

The GoOSe project is not out to replace or out-do any of these projects. We are here to build a community of passionate folks to build the best community-based enterprise operating system around. We will be sharing everything that we learn, everything we modify, and everything we build to help use create this distribution. We all benefit from an improved community structure. We also benefit from having more than one project meeting different goals/niches. The things we learn also help all the other projects out there to have a well functioning system themselves.

GoOSe Goals

Our goal with building the GoOSe project is to have a cool community built around an easily constructed set of enterprise-grade software. The technical pieces of the equation taking the hard part out of building an enterprise operating system. Herlo said it best when he said this with regard to the vision of the project:

"[I see the GoOSe project as a] group of friends hanging out, building cool things with an enterprise-ready technology. Not exclusive to building the technology itself."

Come help us

We're already working away on these goals. You can come and help us. Here are some resources to get you started:

• The project's development mailing list (currently the only list until we need more).

• The project's irc channel

• The project's main web site (currently being worked on)

• The project's main github page.

• The project's main wiki

• A link to "how you can help".

• The project's blog planet.

There is still plenty to be done. Come join us. It'll be fun I promise.