[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

[Sašo Kiselkov]

Mind if I jump in for a bit?

On 08/30/2012 09:20 PM, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz wrote:
> 
> Dear Garett,
> 
> I think I strongly disagree with you.

And that you have the ability is the beauty of open-source at work.

> 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.

Just in case you didn't notice, Linux has been using the kernel/distro
model from day one when it had next to zero users. I think your issue is
not with the distro model, but with the lack of a general purpose
totally open-source distro (kind of like Debian GNU/Linux), at least if
we assume, for the purpose of argument, that OpenIndiana is dead (which
I don't believe one bit).

> 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.

I'm using OI in production myself and while this change may force me to
re-evaluate switching to a different one, I think life will carry on and
a new chief maintainer will, sooner or later, step forward.

> After your message, I looked for the distributions you mentioned above.
> None of them fits the model I want.

Can you be more specific? From where I'm standing, OmniOS looks pretty
much like the old OpenSolaris + commercial support, though I haven't
really looked into it deeply, so comments would be appreciated.

> One of them even doesn't have, in
> their site, a download link, but have a price page.

I think you're talking about NexentaStor - that's not a general purpose
OS, but rather a storage appliance.

> So, we're coming back to some kind of closed model, the same Oracle
> model all of you are critisizing.

AFAIK OmniOS is free to use without commercial support with full source
available. Am I wrong?

> At another one, it seems that some features are disabled if
> you don't have a support contract (zfs send/receive).

That's NexentaStor, the storage appliance.

> So, again, back to the Oracle closed model. If I shall go back to a
> closed model, maybe I'll prefer remain at Oracle.

I think you're mixing up two different product categories: specialized
appliances and general purpose OSes. NexentaStor and SmartOS are very
specialized and as such are ill suited to applications outside of their
respective fields. OmniOS is probably what you're looking for.

> 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.

Linux has exactly the same model you're criticizing (kernel with
separate distros) and FreeBSD is just one big monolithic block (with
various downstreams existing, but with no clear separation).

I short, I think you're framing the issue incorrectly. The fact that
there are various distributions of Illumos isn't a bad thing, that's our
strength! There's plenty of innovation that can be done in the way you
package, manage and handle a distribution, wholly apart from the core
technologies (Illumos). In fact, if anything, I feel like there are far
too few flavors of Illumos, we should have many more. OpenSolaris (the
distribution) was a direct attack on this model, where Sun tried to keep
control of everything, rather than relinquishing it and letting the
community take it where they'd like to see it. If you don't like what
OpenIndiana/OmniOS/whatever is doing, go ahead and create a new distro.
Take the Illumos core, build it, install it and build your own software
stack on it. That's what Linux has been doing for over 20 years now and
has been wildly successful at that.

Btw: just as a side-thought, I believe we need an Illumos equivalent of
the Linux From Scratch book. Back in the day I used it to create my own
Linux distro that was basically a NeXTStep clone - it's been done a
thousand times before, but what the heck, I wanted my own!

Cheers,
--
Saso