[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Ian Johnson]

On 2013/05/09, at 17:09, Martin Bochnig <martin at martux.org> wrote:

> On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Milan Jurik <milan.jurik at xylab.cz> wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Milan, 
> 
> 
> good observation.
> Sadly I must agree with you: While Oracle  sees Solaris only as wrapper for their database, the Illumos sponsors only seem to be interested in selling their x64 JBOD solutions and servers.
> Everything else is just "in the way" and doesn't deserve any backing, especially not financial support.
> I experience this all the way along with SPARC, OpenSXCE or whatever is of little commercial use to these corporations. Forget individuals like myself or the other hardcore enthusiasts. But especially I'm not sure if this serves the broader Solaris user base all too well, either.
> 
> Fortunately Garrett is more interested in keeping Solaris a multipurpose OS.
> But only money pays developers. And so only it is able to make a substantial change.

Oracle seems to be taking good enough care of the Solaris desktop on its end. I'm sure it's a peripheral part of their overall effort, but somebody at Oracle is keeping hardware support up to par and fixing desktop bugs. It's not the aforementioned commercial case and it's clearly not being targeted at desktop users, but for someone like me who cares more about ZFS and a good terminal emulator than about Netflix, it's perfectly adequate, and I don't think it's fair to peg Oracle for neglecting the desktop. Clearly, the OI desktop usage case is not going to be a commercial one, so the only question is whether there are enough interested volunteer developers to sustain it. Various Linux distributions have shown that a commercial usage case is not the only way to sustain a general-purpose graphical OS, but they have also had a critical mass of users and developers to support the project instead. I don't know what the long-term answer to that question is for OI, but for what it's worth, the one thing that keeps me off of it as a desktop platform is a CJK text bug in Illumos and not an issue with OI itself.

Ian Johnson