[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Garrett D'Amore]

On May 9, 2013, at 4:00 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:

> On Thu, 9 May 2013, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> There is little "commercial future" in the desktop for Linux distributions as well yet almost all of them have a graphical desktop.

Admittedly true.  And yet, most of them *started* on the desktop.  Linux's roots are in the desktop.  Most of those distros took off because they had a groundswell of support from developer users who wanted it on the desktop -- they didn't have servers, and options like VMware simply didn't exist at the time.  I'd argue that this is largely an artifact of history. I would be entirely *unsurprised* if distro vendors like RedHat and Oracle simply *ditched* their desktop support at some point in the future -- its clear to me at least that folks aren't running those distros on the desktop.

In fact, I can't think of *anyone* who's paying for a desktop OS that doesn't come from either Apple or Microsoft. 

> Availability of a graphical desktop is seen as a requirement for common acceptance.

Historically true, but I seriously doubt it now.  SmartOS is the counter example from this community.  I think there are others.  For example, OpenBSD was highly popular for a long time for its security emphasis, but I don't know *anyone* who ran it on a desktop.

The widespread availability of virtualization like VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels means that there is little need to take over the user's desktop to provide a reasonable environment.  Most people these days develop using SSH, etc.  The folks I know who use Linux would, apart from a few extremists, not care whether the desktop ran Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris, as long as it Just Worked and provided a familiar UNIX-like backend.  (I contend that these principles have lead strongly to the uptake of MacOS in the developer community…. I use an Apple laptop for my own environment, even though I wouldn't *dream* of using MacOS in a server capacity.)  For me, Terminal.app and ssh is along with VMware gives me everything I need for doing cool things with illumos on my desktop.  I explicitly *disable* the graphical login on illumos. :-)

>  Much/most of the graphical desktop development taking place for Linux does not seem to be done by the companies which popularly peddle it (e.g. Canonical has been more of a desktop packager except for its useless Unity).

Only partly true (Qt is the counter example).  But yes, a lot of the desktop development in Gnome and company is done by community members who are passionate about this. And guess what -- almost all those guys are Linux "bigots".  There's a huge trend in those spaces to adopt technologies that are Linux-specific, to the point of near active hostility towards other FOSS.  That creates a huge barrier for leveraging their efforts.  Do we have the kind of volunteerism here to take up a duplicate effort?  And why just duplicate?  If we have *that* kind of interest and volunteerism, I'd recommend actually doing something *cooler* and better.   Of course, that flies in the face of legacy compatibility….


> 
> The argument about "no commerical future" is becoming worn out and tired since that (commercial purpose) is not why OpenIndiana/Illmos users want to log into a graphical desktop.

Worn out and tired it may be, and *yet* people complain about the lack of leadership and progress.  I don't know about you, but I have to pay for housing, groceries, and gasoline (among other things).  So I have to work at things that pay the bills.  I am lucky enough that this maps well to things that are also interesting to me.  Maybe its unfortunate that folks aren't finding ways to make a living at this, so that a developer community will spring up around it.  But more constructive than whinging about it will be to find ways to either a) make a commercially viable case for it so people can get paid to work on it, or b) lead a volunteer effort to make this work.

The problem with "b" is that its a very large, and often thankless, job.  People spend more time complaining about broken things on the desktop, than they do actually helping fix things.  Individual leaders get exhausted, and move on.  This is a recurring theme in this community -- Nexenta desktop, StormOS, AuroraUX, OI, etc. 

So, it comes, for me at least, back to "a".  Figure out a way to make a commercially viable story so that you keep a small group of developers paid.  Right now, I don't know of any such story, and when I bring this up, the responses like yours Bob, amount to nothing more than putting your head in the sand.

Put another way -- even if there were a million illumos users wanting a graphical desktop (there aren't), it wouldn't matter *unless* amongst them there were either the people with the talent and inclination to create and maintain the graphical desktop, or people willing to pay enough money to *employ* someone to do it.  (Alternatively, a business case showing that desktop use is sufficiently important to non-desktop commercial use to justify funding that work.)  To date, none of these have converged.

Frankly, none of this is surprising.  Our desktop technology is inferior in substantial ways to pretty much *every* OS (excepting perhaps NetBSD and OpenBSD.)

	- Garrett