[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Garrett D'Amore]

Fundamentally, the question you all should be asking is, what is the purpose of the project?

The problem with OI has always been lack of a clear vision.  The original purpose, to be a free community-run clone of Solaris 11, had no future.  It was doomed to fail because it was an attempt to follow a leader who who did not want to be followed and was making changes that specifically made such an attempt extraordinarily difficult (like changing closed source dependencies) -- and the leader had also itself lost its vision, or at least altered it, such that it was never going to the same places that the folks behind OI wanted to go.

I'm a big fan of trying to build cool and interesting technologies.  Of innovation.

Can OI innovate?  Its not clear to me.  Thankfully, *illumos* is certainly innovating.  Other distros are innovating.  Some in cases that lead very very far from the "vision" or model of OI. (SmartOS has led the way the most -- challenging many of us to rethink how we manage systems, in ways that ultimately have been extremely beneficial for those who were able to cross the cognitive hurdles presented by its new administrative model.)

Can OI find a niche that sets itself apart from excellent options like SmartOS and OmniOS?  Is there even a purpose to such differentiation?

I don't know the answers to these questions.

I do think that there is always going to be substantial tension between those who want to keep compatibility with their old stuff (whether the "old stuff" be legacy closed source applications, scripts that they wrote 15 years ago, decades old SPARC kit, ancient laptops, or 10 Mbps ethernet with AUI transceivers), and the people who want to innovate and explore modernization (Gary Mills' work to support login names > 8 characters is a prime example of this tension).   Its a tricky balance to find, and many of the hardest working people (Martin Bochnig comes to mind, for example) are firmly in the "don't break my old stuff" camp.  The problem is that this camp is inherently change resistant -- and yet fundamentally OI was already too different from previous Solaris releases to satisfy those folks.

Where this is leading me is this….

1. Is there enough market demand/interest/skills/resources to justify a "legacy style" distro (something more like Solaris 10 than Solaris 11/OI, including SPARC distro support, etc.)  It seems there is almost enough talent here -- perhaps if those forces worked together more collaboratively we'd see something good come about?

2. Is there a need for a more forward looking distro apart from the work being done in OmniOS?  (To be clear, I'm not affiliated with OmniTI in any way -- I just hate to see pointless duplication of effort)

Again, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I *strongly* believe that anyone thinking of stepping up to reboot the OI project (or create any new one) needs to have a much clearer vision -- and needs to be a strong enough leader to more or less enforce this vision.  A democracy here won't work -- precisely because of the pressures I've already indicated.  In my opinion it would be better to spawn two separate projects, each of which creates value to serve their adherents, than to have single project that cannot make any progress because of the inherent inability to resolve the differences between the two main camps.

What I *will* say is this… regardless of what happens, I'm very pleased that illumos will carry on -- and continues to be a home for innovation, thanks in no small part to the efforts of folks like Joyent, OmniTI, Nexenta, DEY, and perhaps many others who've been working more quietly.  I'm incredibly grateful to the team that put OI together -- it filled an important gap in the ecosystem, and contributed significantly to the uptake of illumos -- so regardless of what ultimately becomes of the project, a big thank you to the various parties who put it together.

	- Garrett

On May 9, 2013, at 1:01 AM, Andrzej Szeszo <aszeszo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All
> 
> (Instead of replying to a message in one of the other threads I thought I will create a new one.)
> 
> Just wanted to say that I don't see a future for the project in its current form. There is simply too many packages and too much baggage for a handful of people to look after.
> 
> I think the project needs a new vision and a reboot. If you have any ideas for the project and can write scripts/makefiles to generate a distro/live CDs/etc. - speak up! You don't have to be a leader if you don't want to :)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Andrzej
> 
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