Hi All,

First off - can I ask that people respect others private lives and not CC large 
numbers of people onto this discussion thread, especially those who may not be 
interested. For example Bryan Cantrill has never expressed any interest in 
collaborating on OpenIndiana, and is committed to working on SmartOS and 
illumos. He is a busy man, and it's rude to CC busy people onto discussions 
they most likely don't care about.

Those who care will read the threads on the two mailing lists, illumos-discuss 
and oi-dev.

Dave,

> Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 16:38:34 -0500
> From: davidha...@gmail.com
>
> Collaboration Criteria:
> - The original promise was for both Intel & SPARC in the community,
> that promise should be kept.
>
> Forster Other Goals
> - Embedded appliance is something which should be encouraged (beyond
> storage-only appliances)
> - Expansion into other architectures to offer embedded hosting
> opportunities (i.e. ARM, POWER, MIPS)
> - Revisit of embedded ZFS (tiny ZFS was a discussion back in the Sun days)

I think you misunderstand how this whole process works. The process does not 
work like this:

1. Show up on a mailing list, having never made any code contributions
2. Suggest a list of features you think the developers should work on

The process works like this:

1. Choose an area of the operating system you wish to improve
2. Ask on the mailing list if this is a good idea
3. Work on the code
4. Share code
5. Code gets integrated

These mailing lists are not a peanut gallery. Porting the OS to another 
architecture, such as ARM, involves considerable effort, several man-years of 
work by highly skilled engineers. Your list of suggestions demonstrates a 
complete misunderstanding of the amount of work involved in doing these things.

There are only two ways that, for example, an ARM port or an embedded ZFS port 
of illumos would happen:

1. A commercial entity decides that they can profit from such an endeavour, and 
hires someone to work on it
2. One or more enthusiasts take it on as a personal passion project

How can you influence this? With 1, you develop a business plan and try to find 
if any investors are interested in paying for it to happen. People don't work 
for free. With 2, sorry, nobody is going to work on it for you just because you 
asked nicely.

Even SPARC support in OpenIndiana, which is already part of illumos, lacked 
sufficient interest to attract developers willing and able to complete it. If 
you want SPARC support, you need to step forward and work on it.

Nobody is obligated to work on any of this. You have no right to tell people 
what to do. Nobody does.

If you have contributed code, then you may be able to influence the opinion of 
existing developers and perhaps encourage them to work on a feature you'd like. 
However it is up to them whether they do so or not. If it doesn't align with 
their goals, then most likely they'll decline.

OpenIndiana's contribution method is very clear. Checkout 
http://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland and start hacking. Until you've done 
this, you have no project karma.

On the topic of collaboration, illumos sees plenty of collaboration, with a 
regular stream of commits from various entities, both commercial and community. 
You can see the commit log here:

http://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master

OpenIndiana has 7 or 8 active developers, who collaborate together via #oi-dev 
on irc.freenode.net, via email, and via the oi-dev mailing list.

Collaboration between distributions is a moot point. OI is a collaborative 
distro who welcome contributions. The other distributions were started by their 
respective founders not because OI doesn't collaborate, but because they have 
different goals.

People cannot show up out of the blue and shout "Hey man, progress is so slow! 
This sucks! You know what? You guys need to collaborate! How about you port to 
POWERPC cause I heard its awesome. By the way can you port GNOME3 and I really 
need my AMD graphics card working, also can you add support for my new netbook. 
Any chance of USB3 support? Thanks guys, let me know when it's done!" 

All it does is /piss people off/.

Regards,

Alasdair                                          

-------------------------------------------
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

Reply via email to