On Saturday, November 20, 2010 05:40 PM, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz wrote:
Christopher Chan wrote:
On Saturday, November 20, 2010 07:56 AM, Gary wrote:
I'm replying to this thread here instead of on the developer lest
someone issue me a netiquette citation for being off topic. How do you
quantify something like that? Even if you have some industry confirmed
sales numbers comparable to IDC tracking desktop PC and notebook
sales, how do you figure out just how many users a server has
regardless of its operating system? Does a web server have a half
dozen users because there are two sysadmins, two content providers,
and two developers? Or does it have 10 million unique visitors every
day and therefore have ten million and six users? Whenever I see this
comment it boggles my mind -- especially when in the context of Unix
systems regardless of flavor. For example, the commercial OSes that
have sold licenses based on 10 users or unlimited users. Ten users of
what? Shell accounts? Ten entries in the password file? What does that
mean and how can you claim that one OS has more "users" than any
another?
I think we can safely assume this to mean installations. Number of
people that actually use the installation would seriously inflate the
numbers. If we go by the latter, you have more than 750 users of
OpenIndiana already from just my installations alone.
Thanks Chris, you've perfectly understook this even without knowing the
context I said it.
<rant on>
In some communities it's becoming really hard to open your mouth without
risking to be flamed...
</rant off>
In what way did I flame Gary? If expressing my opinion equates flaming
then I feel very sorry for you. In fact, if you want an example of a
flame, maybe what seems to be a sarcastic reply higher up seems to smack
of a flame more than my reply since I did not imply anything about Gary.
But in the context, I told that if OI wants to innovate, a support from
some big companies is a requirement.
And to explain what innovate means, in my mind, I'm thinking about
things like improving the kernel threads model, or creating new
features, *from scratch* as did Sun, features like ZFS, DTrace, zones
and so...
Examples of inovation mentionned at oi-dev list are adding KDE, or
removing the question "are you in a sub net" when using "zlogin -C" for
the first time. In my mind, these are just examples of integration
solutions, hacks, or similar things, not innovations...
So they are not innovations that sprung out of nothing but when doing
something new by integrating existing technology to bring about a more
comprehensive experience sure counts in my book.
So, to really innovate, at research level, you shall be funded and
supported by someone, with a team big enough and with required skills...
Not just a small hand of integrators, as it seems we have here.
Examples of FOSS supported by big companies are are Fedora, postfix,
sendmail (for some time) ...
And, as I said, if the number of, say, installations, is very low, it's
harder to get some support from big companies...
postfix was written from scratch without any existing user base by
Wietse for IBM. Upstart in Ubuntu likewise for Canonical. So too
reiserfs for an example of something in a kernel for DARPA. Linux itself
had zero commercial support in the beginning. The number of
installations or the number of users does not necessarily have any
contributing factor to whether some 'big company' will support the
research and development of something. The Linux kernel was offered an
enhancement feature by a single person who was not a C programmer by
trade. I am not saying that this is the way to go but that we should not
preclude innovation (features from scratch as written in your book)
coming from seemingly impossibly resource constrained sources.
Just a complement, I'm not expecting OI to remain, in the future, fully
compatible with Solaris, as I think it will undoubtely diverge. I expect
OI to be just an alternative to Oracle Solaris. In the same way that
creating a new OS 100 % compatible with Microsoft Windows is something
nobody is looking for.
Well, I'll close my mouth, from now...
We can't have that. If everybody stays mum then how can we get a list of
ideas for vetting? For now I think we should stop worrying about where
innovation will come from and concentrate on keeping Openindiana relevant.
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