On Nov 23, 2011, at 6:19 AM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but:
>
> 1. This distribution is a subset of OpenIndiana. It is effectively Illumos +
> what's currently in oi-build, which we've agreed to move up into Illumos as
> illumos-userland on the principle of collaboration between Nexenta and OI
> (and presumably because Nexenta couldn't commercially safely use oi-build,
> which is fair enough). The key difference is the use of dpkg instead of IPS
> for personal preference reasons.
Yes. Ultimately, I want illumian to be a project driven and owned by the
community -- really you guys.
>
> 2. This distribution is to be used by Nexenta to create their commercial
> offering on top.
Yes, but we will maintain a private fork of it.
>
> 3. Because of 2, it's effectively Nexenta controlled and not a true community
> distribution -
That's where you are wrong. We intend to completely hand over the reins, and
we will run our own private fork of it for our product. In fact, there is a
lot of things that the community wants that we *don't* want, but illumian
should follow what the community wants. Really, I want to see illumian run by
the OI team + some guys who's time we will donate but I intend that they will
start out as "new contributors" -- i.e. they won't be making key decisions --
at least not until the OI community is convinced that it is appropriate for
them to do so based on proven trust/experience.
> Nexenta will want to retain some degree of control, whilst keeping it an open
> source project so contributions can be accepted. Fair enough again, Nexenta
> the company need ultimate say over the distro their commercial product runs
> on.
This is why we will have our own fork.
>
> 4. Ultimately, anyone who wants GNU/OpenSolaris aka Nexenta Core Platform
> would be better served switching to StormOS which truly is trying to be
> GNU/Illumos.
Yes. Nexenta is moving away form this -- there are a lot of reasons for this,
but ultimately I personally feel that trying to retain the GNU userland is kind
of tilting at windmills. It also creates an artificial barrier for
collaboration with the OI team, which I want to eliminate.
>
> Because of 1, 2, 3, and 4, I don't understand why you don't call you're
> trying to do "Nexenta Developer Edition" or "Nexenta OpenCore". This is much
> clearer - it explains clearly that:
Hopefully my answers helped cldear that up.
>
> 1. It's made by/controlled by Nexenta
No.
> 2. It's for developers
Its for the same audience as OI, except for people who don't want to, or can't,
use IPS.
> 3. It benefits your open source creds
Perhaps, but only as a contributor to this project and not as an owner of it.
>
> You started out as GNU/OpenSolaris, and at some point you became a storage
> vendor. Due to this heritage you are still thinking like an open source
> distribution vendor, when instead you should be thinking like a storage
> vendor.
>
> IMHO, you'd be better served concentrating on the Kernel via Illumos and the
> storage software stack on top. The bit in the middle that it runs on should
> be a minimal distro, like SmartOS. Doing anything more than this is
> unnecessary, and confusing for all concerned.
That's neither here nor there… but it is where we are headed, but we have too
much heritage wrapped up in debian packaging that we can't get rid of, and I
need to be able to have a platform for development that allows stronger
collaboration with OI. This is my primary goal. (To be completely honest, if
it were up to me, we'd just use OI, and gut the IPS bit out of it and use "tar"
as our packaging system for the appliance. ;-) Is not entirely up to me though.
>
> SmartOS is clearly branded as Joyent's open source part of Smart Datacenter.
> I think Nexenta should follow this model - it is clear and it works.
Joyent are doing something different than we are. We don't want to be an OS
vendor. illumian is our attempt to provide a new OS project that eliminates as
much redundant work as possible, and is more strongly aligned with OI.
>
> Doing the distro under the Illumos umbrella will just send mixed messages to
> all concerned.
See above. You are confused, but not the way you think you are. If you
understood what we hope for this, then the illumian names make sense as "debian
distribution of illumos" -- including the Oi bits. :-)
>
> Dreaming up some crazy new distro name just seems daft. People are already
> confused enough between the difference between "Illumos" and "OpenIndiana",
> people don't have time to learn a thousand different product names.
OpenIndiana is one of the most unfortunate product names I've run across in a
long time. You ought not be complaining about names, IMO.
- Garrett
>
> Regards,
>
> Alasdair
>
>
>
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