[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana roadmap

[Reginald Beardsley]

--- On Mon, 2/18/13, Jesus Cea <jcea at jcea.es> wrote:

> From: Jesus Cea <jcea at jcea.es>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana roadmap
> To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Date: Monday, February 18, 2013, 11:47 AM
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> On 28/01/13 02:43, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Jan 2013, Jesus Cea wrote:
> >> 
> >> Is out there an OpenIndiana Roadmap?. In
> particular, I am VERY 
> >> interested in a security supported version.
> > 
> > How much are you willing to pay for this service?
> > 
> > Oracle charges $1k/year per socket.
> 
> I would actually pay something.
> 
> But consider this:
> 
> * I can't deploy OpenIndiana without some kind of security
> updates.
> 
> * I have tons of clients evaluating OpenIndiana, being
> amazed by ZFS
> and DTrace, but can't consider seriously since there is no
> security plan.
> 
> An OpenIndiana future goes thru an official OI release, with
> security
> fixes for a while. Those markets are, currently, closed for
> OI.
> 
> About how costly this could be, Red Hat is a huge business.
> And we
> could follow a major Linux release, like Debian or Ubuntu,
> to track
> security notifications/patches. Maybe even a community
> security
> supported version.
> 

I read of very high youth unemployment in Spain & Greece.
  
What's the minimum cost of 3 young people w/ appropriate skills?    3-5x that amount  is what one would need to generate in revenue to make a supported secure version exist.  There ought to be a good pool to choose from. 

The problem is how to arrange for them to get paid.  That's the essential first step in creating a supported secure distribution. 

Is there an academic at a university in Greece or Spain that could handle the employment of some grad students doing Illumos/OI security support?  Maybe a joint computer science & business administration business incubator or master's project?  Make a new distro to suit, OI/SE?

That's the cheapest it can be.  If it works there will money to hire more and form a regular business.

As for the roadmap, that belongs to whoever is paying for the work.  If you've got clients who would buy if it were supported and had feature x on the roadmap, hire someone to support it and make the roadmap what your client's want.  The only thing that will make OI really work is money spent on people's time working on OI.

When IBM started supporting Linux, they spent $1 billion.  That's a lot of salaries.  It also tipped the edge in commercial deployments.  We're probably a long way from having that level of resources again for quite a while.  But who knows?  Larry might have a "come to Jesus" moment.

Have Fun!
Reg