[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

Thu Aug 30 18:12:24 UTC 2012

It was written:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of 
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it 
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the 
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of 
despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were 
all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in 
short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its 
noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for 
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." - Charles Dickens

OpenIndiana still provides a niche market for those wanting a stable development desktop OS distro based on the OpenSolaris kernel and having a reliable and stable closed source 2D/3D graphics driver.

Now as to the comments made, they have their place. But on the more positive note, realize the good the project inspired to many users as mentioned in the comments from this article:

"There was a time in history when people said the same thing about linux.. about bsd.. about macosx. 
There are 1000′s of opensource projects in the world. All of them 
interesting for one reason or another. This group has passion and 
tenacity, both necessary for a good group project." - http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/10/15/openindiana-151a-desktop-review/

As for other comments, I always saw sysadmins focused on using the project for server apps moreso than the desktop. So a few of us spent hours updating the server apps specs in SFE, while also keeping the spirit of desktop app usage alive. 

But, there are the goals of the many as well as the goals of the few. As time marched on, the server and embedded device market dominated as the smartphones and tablets replaced many basic desktop user app needs. As for most businesses, it is about profitability margins by addressing market trends and needs. Sometimes, we cannot blame those businesses trying to protect their own bottom line in the sake of us covering our own. When businesses build their niche products and marketing around core strategies like cloud computing, embedded storage, streaming media, render farms, or virtualized web appliances - we needed to see how a distro project like OpenIndiana could help in the administration and development of those projects if even if from only a desktop or server experience.

But in the light of it all and at the end of the day, OpenIndiana prevailed. We can our port of FlightGear 2.8.0 and appreciate the stability of openIndiana on entire test flights. We can use OI with Wine and load the majority of Windows business apps like MS Office or Photoshop needed for a project. Maybe in the sights of others - the glass is half empty. But in our eyes, the glass is only half full...

Thanks for your dedication and leadership the glass can still be filled,

~ Ken Mays

________________________________
 From: Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com>
To: oi-dev at openindiana.org 
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 9:18 PM
Subject: [oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

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.
......
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?

.....

Regards,

Alasdair

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