[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

[Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz]

Dear Garett,

I think I strongly disagree with you.

garrett.damore at dey-sys.com wrote:
> Dear Alasdair,

>
> The model of OpenSolaris is broken. The model of OpenIndiana following
> OpenSolaris is broken. The illumos model is following the successful Linux
> model. This is exemplified by distributions such as the commercially supported,
> general purpose OmniOS, Joyent’s SmartOS, Delphix OS, and others.

In our context, education/research community, we expect an OS coming from some 
kind of model, a model like Linux Debian or FreeBSD, with a free OS (no strings 
attached to it), but with people doing business around it with some kind of 
service (support, installations, solutions, ...). The kind of model we had with 
Sun was also fine for us : in the 80's and 90's with had a site license for some 
number of nodes. After that, till the moment Sun was bought by Oracle, the OS 
was free, but we paid for support. This was also OK.

Openindiana is the Ilummos distribution which best fits what we expect.

IMHO, it's an error making Illumos follow the Linux model for the simple reason 
that the user base size isn't comparable. Still IMHO, because of the difference 
in user base size and the amount of developpers, it should be better to 
aggregate resources in order to have, for the moment, a solid distribution 
instead of all these distributions (OmniOS, Joyent's SmartOS, Delphix OS, ...). 
Maybe this is what is killing Openindiana. You should think about.

Before the message of Alasdair, I was just preparing some dozen of servers to 
get into production in our organization, running some infrastructure 
applications (DNS, mail servers, directory servers, NFS servers, a lot of web 
servers, ...), based on Openindiana.

After your message, I looked for the distributions you mentioned above. None of 
them fits the model I want. One of them even doesn't have, in their site, a 
download link, but have a price page. So, we're coming back to some kind of 
closed model, the same Oracle model all of you are critisizing. At another one, 
it seems that some features are disabled if you don't have a support contract 
(zfs send/receive). So, again, back to the Oracle closed model. If I shall go 
back to a closed model, maybe I'll prefer remain at Oracle.

Now that I know what you really think about the future of Illumos and their 
distributions, I may definitely consider another OS : Linux of FreeBSD.

Best regards,

José-Marcio