[OpenIndiana-discuss] "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[Robin Axelsson]

I certainly hope you are right. But I also hope you are aware of 
survival bias that may "color" your past experiences. It is very easy to 
look at the successful projects that have managed to survive over the 
years in retrospect while forgetting about those project that died and 
fell into oblivion.

I guess it should come to no surprise that most people who use open 
source software don't care. Probably the vast majority don't know about 
Alasdair Lumsden's resignation, let alone that he exists. That's why one 
should take into consideration that for every 100 or so new users 2-5 of 
them may eventually start contributing and developing for Illumos. I 
think incentives such as career opportunities and other things that make 
Illumos and OpenIndiana look "cool" should be important to stress.

Perhaps it would be possible to convince the freeNAS people to use 
Illumos/OpenIndana instead.

On 2012-09-01 16:48, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Sep 2012, Robin Axelsson wrote:
>>
>> I'm fully aware of the power of the command line and it is the 
>> command line that really makes me like Unix based OSes (including 
>> Linux). But making OI look well-polished with a fancy and easy to 
>> administer web-admin GUI that would encourage the average-Joe to use 
>> it as a home-NAS / virtual server is not a bad thing. That way OI 
>> would reach a higher penetration with a larger user-base and most 
>> importantly; it will get _free advertising_. To some extent the old 
>> adage "A good product markets itself" has some truth in it. But it 
>> must not only be good, it has to /look/ good so that even a less 
>> versed person will understand how good it is.
>
> Focusing on issues like this would be putting the cart before the 
> horse.  It is more important to be able to easily build everything and 
> incorporate updates than to have a fancy configuration GUI.  OI 
> popularity should come second to correct functionality and having an 
> organization (of volunteers and corporate entities) to sustain it. If 
> OI is worthy, popularity will follow, even if only from people who 
> already preferred Solaris.
>
> OpenIndiana is still very young.  Successful OS distributions take 
> quite a few years to become significant.  It is not something which 
> happens in just a couple of years.
>
> Bob