Add an introduction for the 2015Q3 report

Discussed with:	wblock

en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.xml

@@ -20,19 +20,60 @@
       an announcement email is sent to the &os;-Announce mailing
       list.</strong></p>
 
-    <?ignore
+    <p>The third quarter of 2015, from July to September, was
-    <p>This report covers &os;-related projects between July and
+      again a period of busy activity for &os;: for the second quarter
-      September 2015.  This is the third of four reports planned for
+      in a row we have the largest report yet published.</p>
-      2015.</p>
 
-    <p>The third quarter of 2015 was another productive quarter for
+    <p>The Foundation continues to play a strong role, bringing
-      the &os; project and community.  [...]</p>
+      both a developer and evangelist presence to conferences, funding
+      much of the hardware that the cluster administration team uses to
+      keep things running, and sponsoring many development projects for
+      &os;.  This quarter we also hear from some of the student projects
+      funded by Google Summer of Code 2015, ranging a wide gamut from
+      the bootloader to additional ARM support, but also at a range of
+      completion status.  Some of the GSoC output is in the tree
+      already, but others could benefit from additional attention to
+      help out our budding new contributors as their schedules fill with
+      the return to classes.</p>
 
-    <p>Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!</p>
+    <p>ZFS and the network stack continue to be strong areas for
+      &os;, with both receiving active maintenance and feature
+      improvements during this quarter.  Substantial work continues on
+      arm64, potentially putting it on the path toward a promotion to
+      Tier-1 status, and a new port to the RISC-V architecture has
+      made great headway in a short period of time.  But it is not just
+      our strengths and exciting new areas that have seen attention this
+      cycle; there are also some parts of the system that are frequently
+      perceived as unchanging infrastructure that have received
+      attention and improvements, with <tt>truss</tt> and
+      (<tt>k</tt>)<tt>gdb</tt> receiving significant overhauls, new
+      implementations for the man page tools being brought in, the
+      website receiving a new skin, and a brand new infrastructure for
+      translating documentation that greatly lowers the barrier to
+      entry.</p>
 
-    <p>The deadline for submissions covering the period from October
+    <p>Nonetheless, despite its record length, this report does
-      to December 2015 is January 7, 2016.</p>
+      not and cannot cover all of the work being done on &os; throughout
-    ?>
+      the reporting period &mdash; there are many bug fixes too minor to
+      mention here, and developers too busy working on the next project
+      to write up an entry for the previous project.  It is not just the
+      developers committing to Subversion that comprise the ongoing
+      activities of &os;, but also the users testing unreleased
+      code or reporting bugs in released code, and participants on the
+      mailing lists and forums helping each other solve their problems.
+      Even the chats on IRC that wander far from the stated topic of a
+      channel contribute to the community around &os;; it is that
+      community whose effectiveness and helpfulness is a key component
+      of the effectiveness and usefulness of &os; itself.  Not just to
+      the developers listed in this report, but to everyone in the
+      community, thank you for making &os; a great operating system.</p>
+
+    <p><i>&mdash;Ben Kaduk</i></p>
+
+    <p><hr /></p>
+
+    <p>Please submit status reports for the fourth quarter of 2015
+      (from October to December) by January 7, 2016.</p>
   </section>
 
   <category>