[OpenIndiana-discuss] Our position within the Illumosphere

[Julian Wiesener]

Hello,

On 08/25/10 02:19 AM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> I had a 20 minute call with Garrett at the weekend, and he stated that he would like OpenIndiana to consider becoming an Illumos sub-project.
> He was proposing one of us join the Illumos Admin council and one of us join their developer council. Garrett had nominated myself for the Admin council should I accept (which I haven't done yet), and was asking for me to nominate one of us to the developer council.
> He also was hoping we'd consider renaming to something Illumos-ey, to become the official Illumos reference distribution. He also hopes we'll use the Illumos bug tracker so bugs can be easily swapped from onnv to the distro and vice versa, and probably hopes we'd use their Redmine CMS for our homepage/wiki/etc.

i personaly like the idea of having a consinsten OS development project
like for example FreeBSD have. It's the FreeBSD Kernel, Userland and
Distribution, there are no name conflicts and other FreeBSD based
distros will just keep their own identity. However, the osol history
told us, that there are very talented people who tend to see their own
project belittled if there is a reference distro with that name.
Both names OI and IllumOS are equal for me, i have to get used with
them, it's just not Solaris.
The question for me is, what will promise the best result in a long
term. I just want an stable open source Solaris like Indiana intended to
be, and i like the usability of IPS, even if it is hard to use in some
parts today.



> OpenIndiana becomes a sub project of Illumos, but only if any other distribution can do the same. This is to benefit from the Illumos foundation non-profit entity (saves us doing it ourselves). It shows the two projects are collaborating closely and are tied together.
> We maintain our independence however in most other regards - separate governance council for ourselves, do not adopt an Illumos-ey name, keep our own infrastructure, own website, own logo, etc. Potentially share a bug tracker.

I would agree that, it totally make sense to use the same bugtracker, al
least for the ON part. Distributing under the Illumos foundation will
also protect the private persons from any legal issues.



> I would not like to be unilaterally appointed to the Illumos admin council just because I took the initiative to start this distro. That's not community - that's not democracy or openness. I would however like to represent our interests within Illumos as we depend upon them and we should be exerting influence over their decisions.

As far i understand, the Illumos councils will be filled with people who
are actually doing something. I guess there is no doubt, that you did a
lot to make OI possible, even if you didn't do everything your self.
However, joining the admin council makes only sense if OI becomes a part
of IllumOS, i don't think it would help anyone if you split your
ressources between 2 projects.



> To that end I think it might be an idea for us to suggest they set up a "Distribution Council". Community distributions could appoint members to this council to represent their interests within Illumos.

Again i think it is a mixed blessing. It would canalize the needs of the
distros what is good but on the other hand it would open the door for
some persons with very difficult viewpoints as a "Distribution Coulcil"
migth contain people from any Distros.



Regards,
Julian