[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

[Milan Jurik]

Hi,

it is not good you resign. And it is not good to see OI going nowhere. 
Here I had long e-mail about how stupid is to think OI is threat to 
Nexenta (Oracle way of thinking), how irrelevant is what Bryan Cantrill 
says, how stupid is to give up developer desktops etc. But nobody would 
read it and it is not important now.

More important is - what is immediate impact of your resignation? Is it 
end of OI?

 From my point currently Jon is moving /dev slowly forward - is he 
willing to continue in it with help from few remaining people?

oi-experimental is dead end, so is illumos-userland. Good thing. It was 
big switch breaking things and wasting resources.

oi-build is slowly taking attention as much better way in our current 
situation.

There is question about prestable, if it should stay as prestable or we 
can accept it as moving dev (as it is now in reality). Would automated 
release every 2 weeks help? Yes, some releases can be broken but we have 
BEs and people will be forced to fix things or leave.

Currently I fixed the most of things around OI SFE so I can move my 
attention back to illumos and OI after my vacation the next week. With 
small change, from July I switched my position in company and my spare 
time is very limited. But long winter nights are comming :-)

Best regards

from mad man who is using OI as his primary desktop at home

Alasdair Lumsden píše v st 29. 08. 2012 v 02:18 +0100:
> 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.
>
> Regards,
>
> Alasdair
>
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