[OpenIndiana-discuss] To the OmniOS, OI and SmartOS community

[Guenther Alka]

*Its time to consider pla**n**B/C ??*
to: omnios-discuss, openindiana-discuss, smartos-discuss

The announcement of OmniTi to cancel OmniOS from now to then is a real 
disaster not only for OmniOS users but for the whole Illumos platform. 
Many users who want a free Solaris based OS especially in production 
environments selected OmniOS as their preferred Illumos platform mainly 
with use cases storage and general server applications.

The reasons:*OmniOS=**Up to date Illumos*
+ commercial support option (although way too expensive)
+ own developments like LX zones integration from SmartOS or drivers
+ stables/long term stables with very experienced full time staff 
(thanks to Dan and Dale again)

As OmniTi has released a new stable 151022, I/we have some time maybe to 
the end of the year unless OmniOS is out of sync with Illumos in a non 
tolerable amount.  Bugfixes of serious problems may be the case until 
then (hope so).

What are the/my options


*Plan A*
Hope for a continuation of OmniOS as a well maintained 
community/commercial project with further development, ongoing stables 
and bugfixes optionally with some paid contributions under the umbrella 
of a firm or at least with some experienced members that were already 
resonsible for OmniOS or an Illumos distribution and that can be trusted 
for next years.

While I hope for this, I doubt that this is a serious option. I switched 
from OpenIndiana to OmniOS three years ago as the OI community was too 
weak and development nearly stalled at that time. I am not interested in 
a new weak OmniOS community for a distribution that should be used as a 
production system. The OmniOS community will be propably too small 
forever as we already have the Illumos community project OpenIndiana 
nearly identical to OmniOS from distribution, features and use cases. 
And a very important thing: The brand OmniOS has already a very bad name 
as a dead/failed project in the press mostly affecting Illumos as well.


*Plan B*
OpenIndiana is a quite established community project for an up to date 
Illumos distribution. I would say its nearly identical to OmniOS beside 
the missing LX improvements from OmniOS but with an additional GUI 
option. I hope to see LX zones upstreamed to Illumos. OpenIndiana 
currently offers a rolling development of newest Illumos bits with 
snapshots every 6 months but without an additional stable repository 
with backported security fixes. Every update give you the newest Illumos 
fixes and features but also the newest bugs (ongoing dev, unstable).

If OmniOS has to become a community project, I undoubtly would prefer a 
merge of the two distributions up from next releases. OpenIndiana with a 
stable repo for every snapshot and with a repo as development path would 
give me what was the main advantage of OmniOS beside commercial support. 
Access to such a stable repo optionally under an OmniOS brand may be 
even a paid (if affordable) option. Such a merge would strengthen 
Illumos at first place but also free OpenSource distributions like 
OmniOS and OpenIndiana.


*Plan C*
There is another free Illumos distribution with an enterprise background 
suited for datacenter use: SmartOS. It even adds unique Cloud and 
virtualisation features like KVM, Solaris zones, Linux zones and Docker 
support. As it is running from RAM with everything important on a 
datapool it is a very stable/ easy recoverable option but it lacks some 
features in the global zone that are required for a storage server.  An 
additional plus is the pkgin repo with lots of supported long term 
stable services.

Using SmartOS would require a mechanism to allow storage services like 
SSH, Crossbow, iSCSI, NFS and SMB on the global zone with an option to 
save/restore settings from a datapool to be persistent. To be honest, a 
SmartOS that is capable to act as a storage appliance would be my dream 
option, at least as an additional option. This would require that 
SmartOS is not actively hindering this or preferable is helping to 
implement a save/restore option for global zone settings&features.


*Discuss*
But whatever option is coming, end the Illumos fragmentation for the 
sake of one strong free community distribution with a solid number of 
contributors and one freely available with a commercial background like 
SmartOS/ Samsung owned.


Any comments from OmniOS, OI, SmartOS (omnios-discuss, 
openindiana-discuss, smartos-discuss) communities?
I have send this to all three lists, so optionally answer all lists


best regards


Gea/ napp-it.org