[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [illumos-Developer] OpenIndiana and illumos, part 2

[Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz]

Christopher Chan wrote:
> On Saturday, November 20, 2010 05:40 PM, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz wrote:
>> Christopher Chan wrote:
>>> On Saturday, November 20, 2010 07:56 AM, Gary wrote:

> 
> In what way did I flame Gary? If expressing my opinion equates flaming 
> then I feel very sorry for you. In fact, if you want an example of a 
> flame, maybe what seems to be a sarcastic reply higher up seems to smack 
> of a flame more than my reply since I did not imply anything about Gary.
> 

Errr... You didn't flame him. "I" was flamed as I posted a message at oi-dev list, 
which was considered out of topic.

Read the thread started by Garrett d'Amore in oi-dev archives. It's interesting. I 
agree with Garrett.

   http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-dev/2010-November/

> So they are not innovations that sprung out of nothing but when doing 
> something new by integrating existing technology to bring about a more 
> comprehensive experience sure counts in my book.

There are two kind of innovations : some which is the rewrite of something which 
where already exists elsewhere (e.g. zfs under FreeBSD), and, something which 
doesn't exists nowhere (e.g. dtrace when it was created at Sun), or something 
which needs some research work to validate (e.g., a new thread scheduling model 
for the kernel). Adding KDE to OI is integration (or some similar word), not 
innovation. Integration may still be a hard work and it's something which may be 
absolutely necessary too.

> postfix was written from scratch without any existing user base by 
> Wietse for IBM. Upstart in Ubuntu likewise for Canonical. So too 
> reiserfs for an example of something in a kernel for DARPA. Linux itself 
> had zero commercial support in the beginning. The number of 
> installations or the number of users does not necessarily have any 
> contributing factor to whether some 'big company' will support the 
> research and development of something. The Linux kernel was offered an 
> enhancement feature by a single person who was not a C programmer by 
> trade. I am not saying that this is the way to go but that we should not 
> preclude innovation (features from scratch as written in your book) 
> coming from seemingly impossibly resource constrained sources.

Wietse was hired by IBM after he wrote vmail, which eventually become postfix, - 
am I wrong ? Maybe my memory is confused, but both Wietse and Linus begun alone 
their creation, without any support other than desire to do something new.

The number of installations is just one factor to get support, not the whole 
history. If you try to convince someone to invest, the number of installations may 
be one, but not the only one, indicator of the potential ROI. Sure, in many cases, 
it may not be the most important one.

Being supported by some commercial companies is surely better than having to work 
in a team with very constrained resources. And, IMHO, one surely shall agree that 
people working on openindiana/illumos shall get some benefit from their work. 
Ther's no free lunch... ;-)

Linux is a good example. It seems to me that Linux developpement is supported by 
many companies, both kernel (look at contribs to kernel) and distributions (the 
best example is Fedora).

Other OSs arrive to survive with less massive support, e.g., FreeBSD.

If you compare OI/Illumos with Linux, there is a big difference. Linux is already 
well established with several teams working on the kernel and distributions. For 
the moment, Illumos has one one distrib : OpenIndiana. The main goal now shall be 
to survive.

>>
>> Well, I'll close my mouth, from now...
>>
> 
> We can't have that. If everybody stays mum then how can we get a list of 
> ideas for vetting? For now I think we should stop worrying about where 
> innovation will come from and concentrate on keeping Openindiana relevant.

Yesss... People should try to find the better roadmap to ensure illumos and 
openindiana will survive. But I arrived to an age (> 50) when I haven't any more 
time to discuss with kids wanting to flame me for netiquette issues.

But I hope OpenIndiana and Illumos will find the way to cooperate and create a 
very good OS.