[oi-dev] is there a vector for donating to OI?

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 07/09/2012 06:07, garrett.damore at dey-sys.com wrote:
> There have been technical disagreements, and I've pointed out that there has been in the past what I think represents a lack of clear vision for OI.  But that's *my* opinion, and I don't speak for illumos in this regard.  (Nor can I -- or anyone else -- illumos is moving towards a mutual benefit corporation that would preclude a single person dictating the position of illumos.)

I'm sorry if our vision wasn't communicated properly.

When OI started, Oracle were still publishing all the source to 
OpenSolaris including ONNV. OI was started to provide binary builds of 
that so that those of us using OpenSolaris could continue to do so. This 
made us equivalent to the CentOS->RedHat relationship.

Then Oracle closed the gate and illumos took on a life of its own, and 
soon after OpenIndiana abandoned any notions of being a clone of Solaris 11.

The new vision that arose from this was very much about being the 
leading *community* developed illumos based general purpose operating 
system. Basically what Debian is to the Linux world.

I hope that's clear.

> However I think OI and illumos have been fairly symbiotic -- indeed OI still builds upon the illumos base, and at the moment OI is the "de-facto" reference distribution of illumos.  However, if OI is considering a different base -- say SchilliX -- then that would probably represent a significant rift.   (I have some concerns about the topics of conversation on oi-dev of late; decisions to for example change the shell or filesystem layout can have broad ramifications.  While a distro can choose to do as it wants, if there is that much difference between the base and the distro, then it will be much harder for the base developers to continue to use the distro as a reference.)

The relationship has been entirely symbiotic and I don't think we've 
really had that many disagreements, perhaps only some tension at the 
beginning. OI was always understaffed and it took a lot of time and 
effort for the volunteers to get up to speed on how everything worked.

A lot of the talk you've seen on the oi-dev mailing list regarding 
changing the default shell, splitting off /usr or switching to Schillix 
is coming from the peanut gallery of people who like to provide their 
opinions on things but who have never actually contributed to the project.

We have no intention of moving away from illumos-gate nor making any 
major changes. I also want to RTI all the non-branding related changes 
in our illumos-gate fork - we only maintain it because none of us have 
had time to RTI stuff.

Cheers,

Alasdair