[OpenIndiana-discuss] Goodbye OpenIndiana

[Nikola M]

On 10/ 3/17 12:30 PM, Илья Архипкин wrote:
> I decided to leave your company because of the lack of understanding of
> Russian societies that are crying for a terrorist act in Las Vegas. For 10
> years of my stay, I was promised a lot that I will learn system programming
> but when I went to Java courses the institutions were closed because of
> copyright infringement. I never found the application of this system and
> support from the administrators, now I have Debian as a web server and
> there are not any failures, the repositories are in Russia. And your system
> is not needed by anybody, since all administrators of it refused to be
> persecuted by ORACLE, it is held by one of those who has the exclusive
> right to administer, in your community there are no administrators for
> payment. The system does not even set up the most elementary mail. I still
> think that the project will continue but after 10 years and it will be
> called Miass Opensolaris WebStack

I really don't know what hidden and not so obvious problems of a 
governmental system or any legal kind
you encountered in your country or elsewhere , that bar you from using 
particular OS?
And it's a mystery to me why people choose to cut down whole OSes and 
systems,
without at least trying to address problems they encountered or stumbled 
upon,
real or not real. I bet they are more not real then the real, 
addressable ones.

OI is not a 'company'/corporate entity (apart of that Openindiana brand 
itself is under EveryCity Ltd control and there could be a discussion 
about it),  but yes it *should be a community. Maybe it doesn't have a 
sound of it and have a few problems and small space to discuss and show 
yourself in a good light, but it tries to be one.

Or at least I am inclined to believe that having community is the 
important thing. Maybe others might not agree, and want tight 
corporate-like and censorship oriented and enforcing clique hierarchy, i 
really don't know...

Recent political, or other sad events clearly have nothing to do with 
this mailing list, that is and should be international. Are there some 
recent or all international communication channels or site access , 
disrupted by some government agencies in your country?
There are multiple disruption paths that can stop a human from one part 
of the world to communicate and work with others, depending on local 
situation with the freedom of internet access, but i am not sure if any 
of those really apply in your case.

Do I understand right, that there were some copyright issues on teaching 
material, with some Java courses you were taking? I bet if they would be 
using their own materials, or freely accessible ones no one can stop 
them teaching..
Not to say that 'system programming' is not done with Java at all, but I 
guess something got lost in translation.
And to joke a bit about about it, Steve Balmer (From MSoft) said : 
"Everything is an OS". I guess free software community knows better.

Application of an OS? There used to be 9 out od 10 biggest banks using 
Solaris in 2000's still.
About having 'critical' number of people using an OS, I think that point 
is not so relevant after all.
Maybe things were changed and there were many people shifting from one 
system to another, just to be able to manage existing setups or previous 
admin's decisions.
Yet one never uses just one OS to be fair, and I think that every OS 
have it's purpose to exist, after all, illumos is a powerful 
UNIX-derived (not just Unix-like)  OS for truly many use cases you can 
think of. So "not finding use" is truly in the eye of the beholder and 
really not true.

On the other hand, having  local repositories (sources, binary updates 
of packages) could really be a problem for people accessing them from 
the countries with restrictive or prohibitive internet rules or 
government-enforced site filters ,etc.
I think It could be avoided in two ways: One, someone in local community 
should mirror source code from GIT or Mercurial repositories, and keep 
them updated, and mirror all other materials and sites on local servers.
And Two, projects and communities could make sure that development and 
update process could be more easily decentralized using mirrors.
First thing that comes in the mind is "Will everyone have access to the 
GITHub site" etc. so it comes to the mind as s good option to have all 
the code at least mirrored and published on the main project site 
location, to cover corner cases with a GitHub access.

Oracle really had in previous years some bad actions toward general 
Solaris community, and were truly prosecuting independent Solaris 
community sites, yet one might argue, some of those sites were 
distributing binary patches or parts of Oracle's internal support 
databases as a modes of operation, without actually getting up their 
sleeves and working on open and free OS.
But it hardly could be generalized that Oracle have done _anything_ bad 
to the illumos and it's distributions at all.
At least there are notable code contributions from Oracle employees and 
source repositories from Oracle reused in Openindiana - definitely not 
bad at all.
Yes, there are multiple CDDL interpretations that relate to Oracle's 
rights on the code reuse under the license, but none of it can touch 
everyone's right to use illumos and derived systems.

I think Openindiana is mostly needed for those wanting the same OS on 
their workstations as in the cloud, for standalone small server 
installations, that also need local console/GUI access, and as not so 
bad general use OS for everyday tasks.
It surely have a smaller pallette of applications and not truly measured 
size of community, yet it exists and is still, after so many years at my 
opinion, much better solution then Debian, from the administration point 
of view. (Boot environments on ZFS to start with).
Besides, when contributing to illumos distributions, one might much 
easily "get what one needs" changes integrated, then in Debian.

Regarding "exclusive rights to administer" , yeah, OI community is not 
the most democratic one. And there are asshole cases, for sure.
But it is always related to how much people are willing to chap in. 
Contributing and not destroying or stopping people of contributing for 
their own mis/conceptions to fulfill.
Or at least not advocating negativity with personal "goodby" or other 
notes  on the list? :)

About "administrators for payment" - seems to me that real System 
administrators are prosecuted breed, where some people think they could 
be replaced with "Dev Ops" movement and were shut aside with Cloud 
services offerings, disregarding both higher operational costs for the 
cloud and real life privacy and data protection needs.

If you think about kind of community for payed professionals, who want 
to communicate and exchange ideas, I think it is fulfilling that task.
And much more, allows lifting one's contribution level as much as it's 
abilities are available and time permits.
Maybe advocacy is not that well articulated, but there are many people 
using it now and in the future.

Setting up "elementary mail" is really administrator's task and 
tailoring your installations to your needs. I really wouldn't like 
default installation to have some unneeded services, without explicitly 
set up. If accessing package repositories for additional package 
installations is a problem, local mirror could be set up, as mentioned.

Good luck with 'Miass Opensolaris WebStack'. If it the name of some 
future illumos distribution or Openindiana based distribution or Linux 
based product, whatever, I hope you will do it well and make a good 
"administrators for payment" community around it :) I hope it would be 
free software licensed and code published, because if it would not it is 
not under the scope of free software and open source communities.