[OpenIndiana-discuss] Update info?

[Blake Irvin]

As a longtime Solaris user I don't have to be convinced that it's better in many ways than Linux.  But there is a reality that I've been forced to embrace - developers don't care.

I'm in the process right now of helping a large development team make the transition to a Solaris hosting solution.  I've spent hundreds of hours with my operations team customizing our environments so that they 'look and feel' like Ubuntu.

Why?  Because that's what the current crop of developers know, and it's too expensive to train them otherwise.

My operations team knows that Solaris is great, and we plan to use RBAC to give our dev users safe access to certain system features, but we don't ask the devs to relearn their userland.

On of Apple's great insights, IMHO, was courting developers with a OS userland that *felt* like Linux.  They did this for pragmatic reasons and have seen an explosion of new applications. Do we see this for Solaris?  No.

I love Solaris and want to see OpenIndiana and related distros thrive, so I suggest we give everybody what they want.

I propose an installer or configuration tool that let's a user choose either a 'Server' (traditional Solaris) userland or a 'Compatibility' or 'Developer' mode (one that defaults to Linux/GNU binaries, sudo, GCC, etc).

We all laugh when we watch Ballmer's 'Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!' video, but Sun went out of business almost and MS is still a giant.  Let's be willing to compromise in a smart way so that the OS we all love can reach as many users as possible.


best,
Blake

(If anyone is interested in discussing my proposal in more depth, I'd be happy to start a new thread or take this offline.)


sent from a Unix host smaller than my open hand.