[oi-dev] Remnants... (was:Re: Resignation as OI Lead)

[Cedric Blancher]

On 29 August 2012 03:18, Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear OI Developers,
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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":
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mongodb-user/45C7M_po1No
>
> 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 their right mind would use OI - it ships severely out of date insecure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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

This is bitter, but I can understand you. Illumos has been nothing
than a job generator for ex-Sun employees, and even that space has
become smaller and smaller and those depend on it will fight for the
little room available.

Air is getting thinner, not only for OI but also Illumos itself... but
that is a self-made issue: There has been too much focus on ZFS and
it's "benefits", while ZFS has become better on Solaris 11, and for
those who love open source with ZFS there is FreeBSD, where ZFS runs
smoother and with less memory consumption than on Illumos. It also
*feels* that innovation has stopped in Ilumos.

Each time I read Illumos these days I think about a word: Remnants -
the leftover which was once a thriving empire.

Ced
-- 
Cedric Blancher <cedric.blancher at googlemail.com>
Institute Pasteur