[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-05-09 14:45, Peter Tribble wrote:
> I think you need to go back a level further. What's the project for?
>
> Try to put together a quick mission statement (or even a mission word).
> And work on an elevator pitch that can grab any member of your potential
> audience.

I'd think OI is for developers working and "living in" their operating
system. It is for sysadmins eager to do small tests while on a trip or
commuting to work and back, and running the same OS on laptop and on a
datacenter numbercruncher, administered and maintained in the same way
(kind of like when Sun made an UltraSPARC-IIIi laptop to provide the
whole spectre of machinery). It is to secure laptops from bit-rot, by
storing data with copies=2 and just plain checksum reporting in ZFS on
single-spindle disks (HDD slots are in greater demand than terabytes
on most notebooks which provide one of these and many of others). Maybe
it is (wishful thinking) for home and perhaps SOHO do-it-all machines,
running multimedia playback on the bigscreen TVs and storing all the
family's data securely on ZFS and for doing some interactive work and
even gameplay (you know, there's a lot of good open-source games in
Java or made for Linux/MacOS and potentially compilable for Solaris,
and even the crappy VESA/VGA graphics is sufficient to run i.e. the
strategy games on OI while waiting for something to compile), with
minimum sprawl of PCs made for just one task. Save electrons :)

While virtualization might answer a few of these challenges, especially
for things that are currently absent or incomplete in OI itself, that
would be a workaround and with certain drawbacks/trade-offs in terms of
performance and reliability.