[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana, from opensolaris background...

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Edward Ned Harvey <shill at nedharvey.com> [2010-10-14 12:15]:
> You guys have been busy, nice job!  ;-)
> 
>  
> 
> I am wondering how much similarity there is between OI and osol?  Would it
> be fair to say oi 147 is approx what osol 147 would have been?

OI 147 is roughly the same as OS b147 would have been, there are
a some newer bits (i.e. XNV 148), some fixes besides rebranding
and there are some parts missing (most notably the G11n
consolidation which we couldn't get into buildable shape in
time).
This will change with OI 148 which will include all
consolidations at b148 (the included ONNV will be at last
publically available version which is b147 plus a few changes).

> I'm thinking about source code ... If you guys have "zfs diff" then clearly
> you've gone beyond the latest osol build 134, and I wonder ... Is that due
> to source code that sun/oracle had previously released but hadn't built into
> any osol build?  You haven't actually developed this new feature here as a
> completely separate line of development from oracle, have you?

No, OI currently distributes rebranded versions of the source
consolidations which are made available by Oracle. In the future
we will move from ONNV to Illumos though, so OI will include all
potential innovations developed in the Illumos project.

> Do you have access to any of what they're developing now?  And will you be
> pulling from them at some point, assuming they release what they're doing at
> some point?

Currently only ONNV has been closed, other consolidations are
still open and available at opensolaris.org.
If Oracle should release ONNV sources following a release of
Solaris and changes get merged into Illumos we will get them as
well since Illumos is our new upstream.

> Is OI a complete branch with separate roadmap and development efforts
> outside of oracle?  

We definetly have our own roadmap and goals, that is to provide
stable releases with free security and bug fixes. Oracle and
Illumos are our upstream on which we add some branding and
usability changes and in the future also additional opensource
software.

> I'm guessing it's more similar to the gridscheduler project ... forked from
> the SGE code ... community can release some bug fixes when oracle's being
> unresponsive ... but the future progress is closely dependent on either (a)
> some other major player like IBM or whoever to contribute a development
> team, or (b) wait till oracle releases sources, and then incorporate
> those...  and meanwhile just apply bugfixes etc as necessary as the scarce
> available development effort is able to provide, to compensate for oracle's
> lack of support...

Firstly, only ONNV development has been closed for now and
Illumos is there to replace it and aims to innovate on its own.
Secondly in case other consolidation are being closed we would
have to continue development on our own. The latter would imply
much more work than we have now and likely slow us down but it
neither means that we rely on a major coporate player to drive
development nor that we'd have to wait on Oracle to release
sources.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster