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

Sun Nov 21 14:19:23 UTC 2010

Dear Mr Christopher Chan

Different points of view, remarks, or complains of any short from person to
person shouldn't be understood as serious faults to the honor of anyone, as
long as we do not involve insults. In my opinion all wounds from the
previous fire should be now cured, and I honestly don't think the current
thread even points out to the past.
For whatever that might have cause disturbance for you, I should apologize.
After analyzing the situation for some time I would like to highlight the
possibility of cultural or interdisciplinary misunderstandings in the
back-end of the current conflict. Probably we are misunderstanding certain
responses as more insulting than what they really are for the one expressing
them. It is obvious that we talk the same language, but probably we are
missing the real meaning of things. In Europe the use of irony is very
frequent, for example French are specially difficult in that sense, they
could spend the whole day throwing subliminal irony over you and still be
your best friends. And yes they complain, all the time, for everything. If a
french guy mocks at you by twisting the nicest poetry, you are not supposed
to get angry but probably you are expected to pay back, but always between
the lines, not really fighting back. Another example all the way around
could be expressions like; "chéng zhǎng", if translated as "grow up" could
be pretty humiliating at some places in Europe, while is not as harsh if you
read it in Chinese.
I meet daily with designers and we appreciate non sense commentaries as it
is efficient while brainstorming, as well we like the conversations to be
free from any form of censorship or even moderation as may things could
otherwise just vanish.
The relationship with respect and figures of authority are not the same all
around the world, I never had the pleasure to visit Hong Kong, but I can
share some curiosities from the time I was living in Beijing; I remember I
was hanging around Renmin University during a whole summer, I was meeting
daily one of the persons who were coordinating the foreign students, as I
was joining some interesting lectures and excursions just because of my own
interest. That person asumed I was student because of the fact I was meeting
regularly with the group of Finnish students, and kept all the way treating
me with a very official attitude, he was sweating under the sun with me but
kept all the time a perfectly correct manners, not even showing he needed
water.  But one of those extremely hot days, he realized I was a faculty
member, not a student, so he suddenly relaxed completely down and was
finally able to enjoy the time together. He didn't need to show his position
anymore... We had quite much better time after this moment. This might seem
very normal for a chinese, but to me it was all a discovery!. Probably I
have been mistreating my Chinese student for years, treating him as if he
was just my self..
What I came to say is, we are very different, I do not think there is bad
intention anywhere in this list, people complains when they have to, but
within some limits. Respect does not take the same form everywhere, we
should just apply a *presumption of innocence* concept, no one is guilty
unless we can prove something else.

If you were around the corner, I would invite you for a beer, what is in my
terms certain form of honor.

All the best
Gabriel

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Christopher Chan <
christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> 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:
>>>
>>
>>
>>>> I'm replying to this thread here instead of on the developer lest
>>>> someone issue me a netiquette citation for being off topic. How do you
>>>> quantify something like that? Even if you have some industry confirmed
>>>> sales numbers comparable to IDC tracking desktop PC and notebook
>>>> sales, how do you figure out just how many users a server has
>>>> regardless of its operating system? Does a web server have a half
>>>> dozen users because there are two sysadmins, two content providers,
>>>> and two developers? Or does it have 10 million unique visitors every
>>>> day and therefore have ten million and six users? Whenever I see this
>>>> comment it boggles my mind -- especially when in the context of Unix
>>>> systems regardless of flavor. For example, the commercial OSes that
>>>> have sold licenses based on 10 users or unlimited users. Ten users of
>>>> what? Shell accounts? Ten entries in the password file? What does that
>>>> mean and how can you claim that one OS has more "users" than any
>>>> another?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I think we can safely assume this to mean installations. Number of
>>> people that actually use the installation would seriously inflate the
>>> numbers. If we go by the latter, you have more than 750 users of
>>> OpenIndiana already from just my installations alone.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Chris, you've perfectly understook this even without knowing the
>> context I said it.
>>
>> <rant on>
>> In some communities it's becoming really hard to open your mouth without
>> risking to be flamed...
>> </rant off>
>>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>> But in the context, I told that if OI wants to innovate, a support from
>> some big companies is a requirement.
>>
>> And to explain what innovate means, in my mind, I'm thinking about
>> things like improving the kernel threads model, or creating new
>> features, *from scratch* as did Sun, features like ZFS, DTrace, zones
>> and so...
>>
>> Examples of inovation mentionned at oi-dev list are adding KDE, or
>> removing the question "are you in a sub net" when using "zlogin -C" for
>> the first time. In my mind, these are just examples of integration
>> solutions, hacks, or similar things, not innovations...
>>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>> So, to really innovate, at research level, you shall be funded and
>> supported by someone, with a team big enough and with required skills...
>> Not just a small hand of integrators, as it seems we have here.
>>
>> Examples of FOSS supported by big companies are are Fedora, postfix,
>> sendmail (for some time) ...
>>
>> And, as I said, if the number of, say, installations, is very low, it's
>> harder to get some support from big companies...
>>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>> Just a complement, I'm not expecting OI to remain, in the future, fully
>> compatible with Solaris, as I think it will undoubtely diverge. I expect
>> OI to be just an alternative to Oracle Solaris. In the same way that
>> creating a new OS 100 % compatible with Microsoft Windows is something
>> nobody is looking for.
>>
>> 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.
>
>
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