[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Garrett D'Amore]

On May 9, 2013, at 1:05 PM, Milan Jurik <milan.jurik at xylab.cz> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> OK, so start yet another distro :-)
> 
> OI needs one thing it does not have - release engineering "team". Jon is
> too busy and I cannot do that. I am happy to work on some things from
> time to time for fun but my job is more and more time consuming and I
> enjoy it (and my private life also). And to be fair, with total lost of
> interest in desktop systems in Illumos by "core team", I have less and
> less motivation to work on it.

I'm not sure who the "core team" for illumos is -- I'd guess I'm part of it, since I started the darn project, but we don't have any definition of core team, apart from the Developer Council.  As the developer council is made of up some of the most widely recognized illumos/Solaris leadership, and almost *never* actually makes any official decisions, its hard to say there is any group of people that you'd say "has no interest in desktop systems".

What *is* true is that there is zero commercial investment in illumos on the desktop, while there is substantial commercial investment on server side innovation.  This is not a bad thing -- we (the commercial investors in illumos -- the folks who use and develop it as part of our day jobs) simply recognize that like any tool, illumos has some tasks that it is well suited for, and others where other tools make more sense.

Some may attribute this type of thinking to nefarious purposes, but it really comes down to something much much simpler.  Economics.  Maintaining a desktop capable system is *hard*.  Making one that can compete against capable offerings from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Canonical is *really* hard.  And *those* guys are fighting a battle to keep the very desktop itself, relevant, in the face of tablet devices.  And so how do you make a commercial case for investing in illumos on the desktop?  There are some specious arguments for supporting legacy uses, facilitating developer adoption, etc., but none of them have actually borne fruit, and there are known non-trivial hurdles for such cases.  Indeed, the very failure of OpenSolaris itself can be cited as an example of this failure -- Sun with not inconsiderable investment and resources, was unable to make a commercially viable desktop based on Solaris technology, even though they were clearly willing to do so even at the *expense* of their otherwise lucrative server business.

So most of us have learned from those failures (even though they may not have been our own), and moved on.

(Admittedly there are still people in Oracle working on the Solaris desktop, but AFAICS that mostly amounts to acting as a gateway to Microsoft systems via Rdesktop, or acting as a glorified webtop / kiosk front end.  And I think you'd be hard pressed to show those efforts as being profit centers within Oracle.  They're mostly seen as supportive of Oracle's other more core business needs.)

Upshot, *today* anyone who thinks there is a commercial future in illumos on the desktop is probably smoking something.  There are a few people who would be willing to pay for it, but it needs more than a few dozen people willing to pay a couple hundred dollars (more often substantially less) to make this a viable and interesting (economically) venture.

What that means is that illumos desktop technologies have been relegated, at least for the time being, to the realm of hobbyists.  In some cases, very talented hobbyists -- even in some cases people who work professionally on illumos server technologies --, but hobbyists nonetheless.

All this said, I'd love for someone to come up with a believable, realistic story for making a commercial desktop product on illumos.  I think it would be good for illumos.  But in the absence of more compelling evidence to the contrary, I'd question the sanity, or sobriety, of anyone who seriously thought that commercial investment in illumos on the desktop made sense today.

	- Garrett