[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

[Bayard G. Bell]

There are moments for speaking to what has passed, whether a time, a
person, or a phenomenon, and there are moments for autopsies. As the two
mix awkwardly, I think it mete to deliver only the latter at this moment
and speak of the tremendous respect I have for Alasdair for what he
attempted with OpenIndiana.

He believed that illumos needed and still needs a community that keeps
it a general-purpose operating system. He believed that the core
technology and innovation it represents is something the free software
world should be able to enjoy broadly. He believed a lot more software
needed to be ported, used, and maintained on illumos, both for the
benefit of the core platform and for the benefit of the larger
open-source ecosystem. In furtherance of this, he gave his time and was
generous with the support of EveryCity, whose staff were a significant
boon to the project and whose hardware kept the project running and
building.

It is not Alasdair's funeral but OI's that we now mark. I cannot imagine
the project regaining momentum without him, nor do I think that one
should too quickly discard the traces of what it kept alive over the
last several years. OI may not have succeeded in its original ambitions,
but one should converse with its ghost, which will remain with us, and
try to understand what happened and why in the proper time such a
reckoning takes.

OI may yet survive in some material sense. As much as anything else, OI
was an idea, both in its ambitions and the arrangements it made to
pursue them. Ideas live on by evolving: their durable kernel isn't
necessarily understood by reflecting on their intellectual substance but
by retrospection on the adaptations that allowed it to continue. Only
when a more robust practical order is found that resurrects what it
attempted will we be able to judge it properly on the strength of its
ideas.

Alasdair is still with us, and I have no doubt that he will continue to
advocate and work for the values that led him to found the project in
the first place.

Alasdair, I wish you and EveryCity the best, and I look forward to our
paths crossing again in what I hope will be brighter days for all
involved.

Hail, hail,
Bayard

On Wed, 2012-08-29 at 02:18 +0100, Alasdair Lumsden 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.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Alasdair
> 
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