I have been very interested in Open Indiana, but I was having the hardest time trying to figure out how to plug in. Also, my interest would be participating in a SPARC distribution. SVR4 environment is key.
No SPARC support effort is keeping me at bay with OI. I have V100's, Ultra60's, V240's, and SunRays. With Oracle abandoning those platforms, OI has a short window of opportunity to pick up the slack. Tighter memory footprint for embedded systems (128MB) would bring me along under x86, so I could upgrade off of the original Solaris 10 release. Requiring some special Windows packages from Microsoft kept me from making a bootable USB stick. The only Windows box I have does not have those libraries & I am not allowed to install them (in order to install the USB image, as I tried in the some distant past.) I am not interested in a Linux distribution where standard POSIX scripts don't work. The direction of not making modern ksh the default shell in Solaris 11 seems crazy to me, something I would change in a heartbeat with OI. It is the completely backwards path taken from adding ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc. and building Solaris as an independent life form for others to emulate. A clean SVR4 package repository integration into a next generation sunfreeware.com is needed... without the baggage of high level languages. Delivery of patches (can be straight SVR4 packages) with central cloud repository would be nice. Making new SVR4 packages throw default warnings with pre-post [de]install and creating services integration could bring it on-par with Oracle packaging. New central packaging and patching can be built via Yahoo Pipes and Google services where people register for a free service[s] and connect it together with RSS feeds to OI and next gen sunfreeware. I am willing to help, but I don't see much direction from the OI web site. I am not a C programmer, but most of what I outlined above does not require C (exception of SPARC support) to be fast. I have contributed on Wikipedia, after people said it was not needed, because I could. OI just looks like it needs a decent architect to provide guidance and accept the help that is offered by people who are willing, in order for them to meet their own needs throughout their OI contributions. Maybe I sound a little bitter now. Sent from my iPhone On Nov 26, 2011, at 10:37 PM, Alasdair Lumsden <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23 Nov 2011, at 19:32, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > >> I doubt that's terribly realistic, or even that useful. But yes, a more >> periodic and regular release schedule is definitely something we hope for. >> OI has had 3 releases in the 18 months or so since the project was announced >> … this is too infrequent for an active open source project. Especially one >> as young as ours. > > Unfortunately drumming up interested developers has proven exceedingly > difficult. Without commercial backing, very few people are willing to invest > the time and energy in making the distro. The last release stalled completely > and took a concerted effort by richlowe and myself to get it pushed out. > Neither Andrzej or Trisk were willing to provide any more of their time on it. > > Imagine Illumos with no Delphix, Nexenta or Joyent support. That's where > OpenIndiana is at. It sucks, but there we go. > > I am rather saddened that Nexenta and Joyent have shown so little in helping > OpenIndiana (although I appreciate there is no direct commercial reason for > doing so). But I'm even more saddened that the greater community have shown > little interest either. If OI were to die, it would be a big loss for all of > us. It gets over 5000 downloads a month and has done since launch, which is a > significant number. > > Perhaps this failure is my own; I have failed to drum up developer interest. > I have no prior background in managing an open source project, and I also > have a full time business to run, giving me insufficient time to devote. It > just isn't enough - and sadly nobody else has really shown any interest in > leading the project either. An early attempt to put in place an > administrative structure showed just how disinterested people were in helping > to manage it. > > Illumian on the other hand has the commercial backing of Nexenta, so I have > no doubt that this distribution will see a greater pace of development than > OI. It's unfortunate that things have come to this, and I hope you can > appreciate why I and other OI developers are unhappy (bitter) about it. In > some respects it is an indirect attempt at a coup d'état, whether intentional > or not. You could have chosen OI as your base, and helped strengthen our > community, but you have decided not to. > > When I started OI I wanted to unite the community around one solid community > distribution. I hoped that if everybody pulled together, we could really > build something special. But more importantly, I hoped we could stay relevant > in an increasingly linux-centric world. To send a united message to the world > that here is a solid distribution with serious backing. Instead, everybody > has gone off on their own direction, weakening everything. This is just > another example of yet more fragmentation. > > Illumos will continue to provide a solid kernel for Nexenta and Joyent's > products, but I am no longer hopeful about us competing with Linux. Not as > things stand. StormOS, Belenix, Schillix, have fractional numbers of users > compared to OI, and I have no doubt that Illumian will become another > marginal distribution too. If we'd all rallied around OI instead, we could > have collectively achieved a great deal more, and fought out a bigger place > for ourself on the operating systems stage. > > The last thing I want is for OI to haemorrhage users due to inactivity. You > think they'll switch to Illumian? No. They'll bugger off to Linux. That's > what a significant volume of users did after Oracle canned OpenSolaris. > > What you have done, all of you - anyone who stands to benefit from the > success of Illumos who has ignored OI, IMHO, have shot yourself in the foot. > > ------------------------------------------- > illumos-discuss > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175845-b97465aa > Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
