[oi-dev] basis for better collaboration on illumos and OpenIndiana: small circle, Big circle‏

[Alasdair Lumsden]

(Resending to oi-dev as I recently changed my mailing list email address)
Hi All,

First off - can I ask that people respect others private lives and not CC large numbers of people onto this discussion thread, especially those who may not be interested. For example Bryan Cantrill has never expressed any interest in collaborating on OpenIndiana, and is committed to working on SmartOS and illumos. He is a busy man, and it's rude to CC busy people onto discussions they most likely don't care about.

Those who care will read the threads on the two mailing lists, illumos-discuss and oi-dev.

Dave,

> Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 16:38:34 -0500
> From: davidhalko at gmail.com
>
> Collaboration Criteria:
> - The original promise was for both Intel & SPARC in the community,
> that promise should be kept.
>
> Forster Other Goals
> - Embedded appliance is something which should be encouraged (beyond
> storage-only appliances)
> - Expansion into other architectures to offer embedded hosting
> opportunities (i.e. ARM, POWER, MIPS)
> - Revisit of embedded ZFS (tiny ZFS was a discussion back in the Sun days)

I think you misunderstand how this whole process works. The process does not work like this:

1. Show up on a mailing list, having never made any code contributions
2. Suggest a list of features you think the developers should work on

The process works like this:

1. Choose an area of the operating system you wish to improve
2. Ask on the mailing list if this is a good idea
3. Work on the code
4. Share code
5. Code gets integrated

These mailing lists are not a peanut gallery. Porting the OS to another architecture, such as ARM, involves considerable effort, several man-years of work by highly skilled engineers. Your list of suggestions demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the amount of work involved in doing these things.

There are only two ways that, for example, an ARM port or an embedded ZFS port of illumos would happen:

1. A commercial entity decides that they can profit from such an endeavour, and hires someone to work on it
2. One or more enthusiasts take it on as a personal passion project

How can you influence this? With 1, you develop a business plan and try to find if any investors are interested in paying for it to happen. People don't work for free. With 2, sorry, nobody is going to work on it for you just because you asked nicely.

Even SPARC support in OpenIndiana, which is already part of illumos, lacked sufficient interest to attract developers willing and able to complete it. If you want SPARC support, you need to step forward and work on it.

Nobody is obligated to work on any of this. You have no right to tell people what to do. Nobody does.

If you have contributed code, then you may be able to influence the opinion of existing developers and perhaps encourage them to work on a feature you'd like. However it is up to them whether they do so or not. If it doesn't align with their goals, then most likely they'll decline.

OpenIndiana's contribution method is very clear. Checkout http://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland and start hacking. Until you've done this, you have no project karma.

On the topic of collaboration, illumos sees plenty of collaboration, with a regular stream of commits from various entities, both commercial and community. You can see the commit log here:

http://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master

OpenIndiana has 7 or 8 active developers, who collaborate together via #oi-dev on irc.freenode.net, via email, and via the oi-dev mailing list.

Collaboration between distributions is a moot point. OI is a collaborative distro who welcome contributions. The other distributions were started by their respective founders not because OI doesn't collaborate, but because they have different goals.

People cannot show up out of the blue and shout "Hey man, progress is so slow! This sucks! You know what? You guys need to collaborate! How about you port to POWERPC cause I heard its awesome. By the way can you port GNOME3 and I really need my AMD graphics card working, also can you add support for my new netbook. Any chance of USB3 support? Thanks guys, let me know when it's done!" 

All it does is /piss people off/.

Regards,

Alasdair