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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US">Hi<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US">This is a very sad day
in
the history of open-source effort, I'd like to give Alasdair my
support in these moment and I really appreciate his words. </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US">The behavior of those
big
firms that gain a lot from the openindiana initiative, but do
not
contribute in the same way, is very annoying and break the trust
that
OI users have with them. This is lack of support is
unacceptable, and only the union of all forces, both from the
private sector as well as large companies can make OI the best
existing operating system.<br>
I hope your decision, <span id="result_box" class="" lang="en"><span
class="">although</span> <span class="hps">final</span><span
class="">,</span> <span class="hps"></span></span> can be
changed. I think you're the right person to lead this project
precisely for the courage that you've had so far.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US">Thank you<br>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US">Paolo Marcheschi<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm" lang="en-US"><br>
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On 08/29/12 03:18, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:503D6DD3.6010809@gmail.com" type="cite">Dear
OI Developers,
<br>
<br>
It is with much sadness that I hereby resign as project lead. I
may, if the situation improves under a new project lead, stick
around to offer my opinion or occasional assistance, but my
resignation is final; I have no wish to return to the project in a
leadership capacity.
<br>
<br>
My resignation is primarily driven by a lack of time; I simply
cannot commit the hours necessary to maintain a project of this
size. I have my life, my health (primarily mental), and my future
to think of.
<br>
<br>
But it is also in part due to frustrations with the difficulty of
making any progress on the project. OpenSolaris was maintained by
a large corporate entity. We however, are volunteers, contributing
our personal time to work on a project we believed in. For many of
us this was the first open source project we had ever contributed
to, myself included. The task at hand was vast, and we were ill
equipped to deal with it.
<br>
<br>
But what really, right from the very beginning, upset me, was the
lack of interest from the large commercial players benefiting from
Illumos, and from those who had been paid to work on Solaris at
Sun. Instead, what we got, was grief regarding the name (Project
Indiana seemingly being a sore point for Solaris engineers,
something I was completely unaware of when we chose
"OpenIndiana"), hostility towards IPS, and a total lack of
interest, encouragement or friendship from people many of us
looked up to when we were mere end-users of Solaris under Sun.
<br>
<br>
Right from the very beginning, Illumos was on life-support. I have
no doubt that Nexenta, Delphix, and Joyent in particular will
continue to innovate and that SmartOS will be a success, but
support for Solaris from the open-source software community has
over the past 2 years gone from bad to worse. Only the other day
the MongoDB developers responding to an issue with it segfaulting
on OI stated "OI isn't supported, use Linux":
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mongodb-user/45C7M_po1No">https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mongodb-user/45C7M_po1No</a>
<br>
<br>
I lay the blame of this squarely on the lack of a successful
general purpose distribution of Solaris/Illumos. OpenIndiana was
my attempt at competing with the Linux distros, but our lack of
progress has torpedoed it. Nobody in their right mind would use OI
- it ships severely out of date insecure software, lacks some of
the most common 3rd party apps such as LibreOffice, and so much
simple shit that should just work, such as "pecl install", "gem
install", "pip install" or whatever barfs due to nonsense
SunStudio flags, to the point you need a background in computer
science and compiler flags to get it to work. Not fit for purpose.
<br>
<br>
So what exactly are 3rd party software developers such as the
FFMpeg or MongoDB developers supposed to use to develop and test
their software on? Buy a SmartDatacenter? Install a storage
product? Run it on a database appliance?
<br>
<br>
All of you, Joyent, Nexenta, Delphix, are complicit in the
increasing irrelevance of Illumos. OI, even in it's current
current state, is by far the most widely used Illumos distro, so
by not supporting it beyond contributing to the Illumos core,
you've all shot yourselves in the foot. With a fucking shotgun.
What's sad is that you don't even see it.
<br>
<br>
It didn't have to be this way. With some assistance we could have
made large strides forward - we had lots of solid ideas of how to
get things moving. What we lacked was time, graft, and expertise
from those who worked on this professionally - items easily
supplied by those with deep pockets and plenty to gain from our
success.
<br>
<br>
Instead we got the Illumian farce from Nexenta, along with their
senior staff claiming OI is an existential threat to their
continued existence. And when I asked for help back in November,
we got Bryan Cantrill telling us all "when you want to do
something, just do it" - rich coming from someone paid to work on
all this whilst the OI devs volunteer their personal time, often
at considerable personal sacrifice, to work on this stuff.
<br>
<br>
With the ZFSOnLinux port becoming increasingly popular (so many of
the Linux users I know are using it), and
brtfs/dtrace-on-linux/upstart/whatever else slowly brewing away,
even some of the core features of Illumos are becoming less and
less important. Yes, the Linux equivalents suck in one way or
another, some are completely and fundamentally broken by design,
but it doesn't matter - what matters is perception and the typical
Linux user is happy with "good enough". When I encourage my
Linux-using friends to try OI they laugh in my face. OI and
Illumos to them is a dead platform. Add to that our increasingly
out of date and poor hardware support due to the march of never
ending new LAN/SATA/SAS/motherboard/GPU chipsets and you start to
get the picture.
<br>
<br>
I hope, I really do hope, that Illumos does not become entirely
irrelevant. But when less and less software works out of the box,
and when heavily used products such as MongoDB, Varnish, etc don't
support Illumos (regardless of whether they actually work on it or
not, what matters is whether these projects will help end users
when they have problems), and when OI disappears and there's
nothing left but a handful of fringe distros or niche products,
what then? You think Riverbed are going to maintain Stingray
(Foremly Zeus) LB on Solaris, or any other commercial software
vendor develop for it, when nobody is using it?
<br>
<br>
Well, I've said my piece. This has been weighing on my chest for
some time and I am glad to have gotten it off. I am not doing this
because I want to start a flame war, I just had to say it or it
would have bugged me for the rest of my life.
<br>
<br>
I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart those of you who
have volunteered your time to work on OI. For those not mentioned
directly, you know who you are and it has been a pleasure working
with you. I hope we can continue to keep in touch.
<br>
<br>
I would, in particular, like to thank Richard Lowe for his
unwavering support. He is without a shadow of a doubt one of the
kindest, selfless, helpful and wise people I've had the pleasure
of dealing with throughout this journey. He was always there to
help, and to provide a modicum of sanity when all hope seemed
lost. Without Rich, OI would likely not exist, and we all owe him
a very large debt of gratitude.
<br>
<br>
I would like to also thank Alan Coopersmith for his support and
impartial help. His presence on IRC provided much comfort to all
of us, and his insights were always highly valued.
<br>
<br>
My thanks go to Garrett D'Amore; without his stellar efforts
creating Illumos things could have been catastrophically worse for
us all. I hold him in high regard and in no way hold him
responsible for the current situation with OpenIndiana, even if he
did help spawn Illumian.
<br>
<br>
I'd like to thank Jon Tibble for his dedication to OpenIndiana,
and for his hard work, especially with the pre-stable releases,
which was greatly appreciated. Jon is a first-class citizen of the
community and I hope he will continue to work on the project even
if I'm not at the helm.
<br>
<br>
I'd like to thank Andrzej Szeszo for his contributions. His deep
insight into complex parts of the distribution, along with his
persistence and capacity for tinkering, have unstuck the project
many times. Again, without his help OI may not have come as far as
it did.
<br>
<br>
I'd like to thank Guido Berhoerster for his hard work on JDS and
his support in getting the project off the ground - again without
his help we would simply not be here.
<br>
<br>
I'd like to thank Albert Lee for his help in the beginning of the
project, indeed Albert was responsible for pulling an all-nighter
to get our first release out. We once again owe him a debt of
gratitude.
<br>
<br>
Lastly, despite their lack of a handle on what's happening with
Unix/Linux distros in the real world beyond kernels, I'd like to
thank all those who have contributed to Illumos, without which
OpenIndiana would not boot. You are the real heroes. I may have
complained bitterly about our little distro being ignored by you,
but you have my respect and thanks for your unique talents in
developing a truly amazing kernel that we all love dearly.
<br>
<br>
I will continue, through EveryCity, to provide hosting for
OpenIndiana's infrastructure. I also hope that a new project lead
will step forward to look after things, and that they can carry
the project forward. If no viable new lead steps forward then I
would encourage the OpenIndiana developers to hand responsibility
for it over to the Illumos Foundation.
<br>
<br>
Finally, I wish Illumos every success. Ultimately Illumos is what
matters, OI was only ever going to be a vessel for delivering it's
power to end users. May it go from strength to strength and get
the recognition, attention and user-base it so rightly deserves.
<br>
<br>
Regards,
<br>
<br>
Alasdair
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote>
<br>
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