[oi-dev] [developer] GSoC? Decision time....

[Alasdair Lumsden]

> Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 15:23:51 +0000
> From: keith.wesolowski at joyent.com
<snip>
> But I guess that's just me. Bluntly, leading with OI or treating it as
> special is thoroughly and uncompromisingly insane. Pretending that, in
> 2014 no less, achieving desktop application parity with 1997 GNU/Linux
> is an important goal in operating systems development probably covers
> half the syndromes described by the DSM-5. In the community I *thought*
> we were a part of, that's a nonissue, because the insanity is kept off
> to the side, separate from the core effort and merely one consumer among
> equals. To each his own. Live and let live. What I'm learning here is
> that many people don't see things that way, and want to explicitly
> define illumos and OI as having a single, shared vision. If that's
> what's happening here, I'll be aboard the next train out of this
> nuthouse.

Hi Keith,

You've made an assumption that OI is purely a desktop OS. What a ludicrous viewpoint.

OpenIndiana aims to be a general purpose operating system for use in numerous deployment scenarios, including on servers. Heck, I'd bet most OI installations are on servers doing storage work.

Nobody ever made the claim that OI wanted to compete with Linux for the desktop. That's a complete waste of everyone's time. My personal development work on OI was all done on a MacBook. My goal at the time was to have a replacement for OpenSolaris, which we had been using on servers at my dayjob.

However there are plenty of people who do want to run it on the desktop, and who are you to tell them they should not do this?

You seem to think that anyone wanting to have an illumos OS that supports the desktop, thinks it can compete with the likes of Windows 8 and Mac OS X. Bullshit. Most of the folk running OI on their desktop just want a functional X Windows with the latest desktop FOSS. They're workstation power users, probably spending most of their time in a terminal window. I seriously doubt they are thinking OI will ever gain widespread adoption amongst the general public.

There are also plenty of reasons why having a strong general purpose distro with desktop support is in everyone's interest. Plenty of server customers wish to run the likes of LibreOffice, Firefox etc in headless mode, and OI facilitates this kind of development work.

There are also plenty of people who want to run a community maintained distribution that's not affiliated with any commercial entity, which OI provides. Given the community status, and given the shared heritage, it's fitting that illumos use OI as a reference distro for builds and integration work.

Not that I represent the distribution any more, or have any say in these things. But someone has to set the record straight.

Alasdair