Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Robert Treat]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Peter Tribble  wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:21 AM, Robert Treat  wrote:
>>
>> I hope the answer to the best safest place is OmniOS. To that end, we have
>> no plans to stop running OmniOS at this time, and presuming the project can
>> make the jump to community maintainership, we won't need to develop any.
>
>
> So, assuming such a jump were to happen, what are we talking about?
>
> (My comments here, btw, are from me as an illumos community member
> and maintainer of another distro, rather than as an OmniOS customer.)
>
> Some items:
>
> The OmniOS name/brand
> The website/wiki
> The illumos-omnios fork (the code)
> The github repos (the infrastructure)
> The pkg repo servers
>
> What happens to those? The real question here is whether they stay,
> with community maintainership, or whether the "new" regime is an
> independent fork? I would guess the latter to be the safest course.
>
> That's assuming a world in which OmniOS-whatever remains as a separate
> entity, rather than taking the view that you throw it away and replace it
> with
> a stable branch of some other distro. I'm not entirely convinced that would
> (a) actually work, and (b) not compromise the other distro.
>
> So that gives you a newly forked project that maintains a distro based
> on the current OmniOS code (preserving the effort that the likes of
> Dan have put in to get LX running), pulling in updates from illumos
> and the other upstreams, with the same sort of release cadence
> and update approach (so you know you're going to get security updates)
> we have at the moment.
>
> Ignoring the who and how for now, would that be what people actually want?
>
> Or are people looking for a different future?
>
> My personal (illumos/Tribblix) selfishness here is twofold; first, I want
> to ensure we keep the current codebase as a going concern (as an
> unmaintained museum it's not interesting), and secondly an active
> project shows the health of the illumos ecosystem in a better light.
>

My opinion is that the most likely to succeed path forward is to keep
OmniOS as OmniOS, just with a more open / decentralized management
structure. Most of what we need is already in place:

- The code is on github, and we can either add committers into the
current group, or move it to a whole new github project space (we
actually wanted to do this, but OmniOS was taken, so it always got
back burnered).

- We can (and should) move the wiki to github. It's currently running
on some proprietary-esque software which is EOL; again, lack of round
tuits to fix this, but if anyone wants to take a stab, we believe the
following script can be used to scrape the content into a github
suitable format: https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/trac2md

- the pkg repo is trickier, but I think the simplest answer is
probably for us to donate hosting for that for the time being,
although there may be others in a better position to offer that.

- with regard to name / brand; Right now it's sitting in a safe place,
but I think eventually the right answer would be to turn ownership
over to a non-profit, probably a small group as an affiliated project
of one of the larger open source non-profits, but it isn't worth the
hassle until we know we have a sustainable project.

What we need most at the moment are a small group of folks interested
in doing active development / code reviews for upcoming bug fixes and
such from other illumos distros, and I think a small group of people
interested in doing infrastructure management (ideally around as many
community available resources as we can).


Robert Treat
https://omniti.com
___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Peter Tribble]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:21 AM, Robert Treat  wrote:

> I hope the answer to the best safest place is OmniOS. To that end, we have
> no plans to stop running OmniOS at this time, and presuming the project can
> make the jump to community maintainership, we won't need to develop any.
>

So, assuming such a jump were to happen, what are we talking about?

(My comments here, btw, are from me as an illumos community member
and maintainer of another distro, rather than as an OmniOS customer.)

Some items:

The OmniOS name/brand
The website/wiki
The illumos-omnios fork (the code)
The github repos (the infrastructure)
The pkg repo servers

What happens to those? The real question here is whether they stay,
with community maintainership, or whether the "new" regime is an
independent fork? I would guess the latter to be the safest course.

That's assuming a world in which OmniOS-whatever remains as a separate
entity, rather than taking the view that you throw it away and replace it
with
a stable branch of some other distro. I'm not entirely convinced that would
(a) actually work, and (b) not compromise the other distro.

So that gives you a newly forked project that maintains a distro based
on the current OmniOS code (preserving the effort that the likes of
Dan have put in to get LX running), pulling in updates from illumos
and the other upstreams, with the same sort of release cadence
and update approach (so you know you're going to get security updates)
we have at the moment.

Ignoring the who and how for now, would that be what people actually want?

Or are people looking for a different future?

My personal (illumos/Tribblix) selfishness here is twofold; first, I want
to ensure we keep the current codebase as a going concern (as an
unmaintained museum it's not interesting), and secondly an active
project shows the health of the illumos ecosystem in a better light.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Robert Treat]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 9:11 AM Linda Kateley  wrote:

> Robert,
>
> After reading everything I can in the last few days.. I have a couple
> questions which I hope you can answer honestly.
>
> This announcement on the heals of a massive change in the freenas
> community make me wonder if there is any "backroom" pressure coming to
> companies supporting zfs?
>
>
Honestly I don't follow the FreeNAS community, so couldn't say much about
that other than I know there is some drama going on over there but it has
nothing to do with us at OmniTI.


The other is ... Is your hosted environment divesting from omnios? If so
> what os are you going to?


> As a consultant and supporter of all things openzfs just want to know
> where the best safest places for my customers.
>

I hope the answer to the best safest place is OmniOS. To that end, we have
no plans to stop running OmniOS at this time, and presuming the project can
make the jump to community maintainership, we won't need to develop any.


> And one short comment.. I have have been watching following you guys for
> awhile now, and I never knew your hope or wish was for the community to
> pick up omnios.

This surprises me. I am sure they would have if they had
> known.


> Thanks for everything you have done for this community
>


Yes, this is clearly our fault, and more specifically mine. We would have
conversations internally about certain projects or initiatives that we
should do to open things up, but between competing company priorities and
the old habits many involved have of living in a Sun/Solaris i.e.
Vendor/Customer style relationship, we just never made much headway.

I'm sure many would say to give it more time or try harder, but if we are
being honest, short of someone showing up with a ginormous check, our
priorities aren't going to change.

In any case, now people know, so let's see what happens :-)


Robert Treat
https://omniti.com
___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2017, Linda Kateley wrote:

And one short comment.. I have have been watching following you guys for 
awhile now, and I never knew your hope or wish was for the community to pick 
up omnios. This surprises me. I am sure they would have if they had known.


This was a surprise to me as well since I have not seen any text on 
the OmniOS web site suggesting a desire that OmniOS be a community 
project and OmniOS development did not behave as a community project 
other than its very positive and helpful interfacing with Illumos at 
large, and encouraging others to build OmniOS from source code.


Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Linda Kateley]

Robert,

After reading everything I can in the last few days.. I have a couple 
questions which I hope you can answer honestly.


This announcement on the heals of a massive change in the freenas 
community make me wonder if there is any "backroom" pressure coming to 
companies supporting zfs?


The other is ... Is your hosted environment divesting from omnios? If so 
what os are you going to?


As a consultant and supporter of all things openzfs just want to know 
where the best safest places for my customers.


And one short comment.. I have have been watching following you guys for 
awhile now, and I never knew your hope or wish was for the community to 
pick up omnios. This surprises me. I am sure they would have if they had 
known.


Thanks for everything you have done for this community

Linda K


On 4/23/17 3:13 PM, Robert Treat wrote:

Security updates are a little bit trickier than just pulling in
general upstream changes, but I think the ideal scenario would be to
form a group of interested people around the "secur...@omnios.org"
label which would collaborate on fielding and producing security fixes
for the project. Given we also have critical production systems
running OmniOS (more than most I suspect), we will need to deal with
security and bug fixes regardless, so we're happy to use those efforts
to bootstrap things.

Robert Treat

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 3:19 PM, Paul B. Henson  wrote:

As both a home hobbyist user of OmniOS and a paid support user of OmniOS at
my day job, I'd first like to thank you guys for putting together a great
operating system that has served me well over the years and I hope will
continue to do so.

However, I would like to clarify your stance when you say you are
"suspending active development" and that r151022 will be the "final
release". Per your historical release cycle:

https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/ReleaseCycle

r151022 was to be an LTS release with security/bug fix support through H1
2020. While there will be no further releases of OmniOS from OmniTI, will
you continue to back port fixes and fix issues in r151022 through that
timeline, or will it be released as is and then be up to the as yet
undeveloped community to do so? We currently have critical production
systems deployed, systems whose deployment was only approved by management
due to the availability of commercial support (the wisdom of such a
perspective we will not discuss), and this sudden development is potentially
going to leave us in quite a pickle. While I certainly can't dictate to you
how to run your business, it would have been much easier on your customers
had you made this announcement with the release of r151022, and coincided
the end of your support offering with the end of life of this last release.
Which also ideally would have provided time for an omnios community to have
developed and started producing their own releases before the last
officially supported omniti version reached sunset.


-Original Message-
From: OmniOS-discuss [mailto:omnios-discuss-boun...@lists.omniti.com]
On Behalf Of Robert Treat
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2017 7:07 AM
To: omnios-discuss 
Subject: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

Five years ago, when we first launched OmniOS, we did it out of a
direct need to push forward the OpenSolaris ecosystem that we had
built into the core of several parts of our business. At the time, the
illumos community was still rather new and taking direct control of
our path forward was a solid next step; we had already built many of
the pieces in-house that we needed to produce a complete operating
system distribution, and our experiences with open sourcing software
we worked on had been generally very good.

While we didn't know quite what the reaction would be, there were two
things internally that guided us as long term factors in our decision.
First, as we have done for other open source software, we thought it
made sense to offer commercial support for OmniOS, but there was no
desire to "pivot" OmniTI to be an operating system vendor. We like the
world of building and running high-scale software and infrastructure
and that's where we wanted to stay. Hand in hand with that was the
second idea, that while we felt it was important for us to take the
first initial steps, in the long term we really would prefer that
OmniOS become an open source project maintained by its community
rather than remain as the open source product of a single commercial
entity (think Debian vs Red Hat, if that helps).

Five years later, we are proud to see that this software has been
accepted by a wide group of companies and end users, and we think this
has been a boon for the illumos community, who are the shoulders we
build upon. When you see companies from all sectors and industry, both
small and some orders of magnitude larger, using the technology you
put forward to build even further; well, it's great to have an impact.

However, 

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Nikola M]

On 04/21/17 09:19 PM, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> As both a home hobbyist user of OmniOS and a paid support user of OmniOS at
> my day job, I'd first like to thank you guys for putting together a great
> operating system that has served me well over the years and I hope will
> continue to do so.
>
> However, I would like to clarify your stance when you say you are
> "suspending active development" and that r151022 will be the "final
> release". Per your historical release cycle:
>
> https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/ReleaseCycle
>
> r151022 was to be an LTS release with security/bug fix support through H1
> 2020. While there will be no further releases of OmniOS from OmniTI, will
> you continue to back port fixes and fix issues in r151022 through that
> timeline, or will it be released as is and then be up to the as yet
> undeveloped community to do so? 

I suppose OmniOS community can pay 2 guys with ease to maintain it and
surrounding expenses.
When you look at it, it is more then cost effective to have 2 guys stay
on the payroll,
not to mention they are already here and Community gets ability to sell
support, so that expense seems not so big even more.

I suspect knowledgeable and able people are in high demand and more
quickly they are re-hired the better for everyone using it. (and won't
be hired by some non-illumos related company)
They won't pay people doing OmniOS in OmniTI, I bet there is many others
that will pay those 2 guys.

Plus side is that other companies can provide and sell OmniOS support
contracts and even more positive wider community influx seems more then
welcome, as I read it.
I also read that security and other updates after OmniOS release got to
be financially organized in OmniOS support group and pay maintaining
people that needs hiring.  (so you also can continue having your support
contract)

> We currently have critical production
> systems deployed, systems whose deployment was only approved by management
> due to the availability of commercial support (the wisdom of such a
> perspective we will not discuss), and this sudden development is potentially
> going to leave us in quite a pickle. While I certainly can't dictate to you
> how to run your business, it would have been much easier on your customers
> had you made this announcement with the release of r151022, and coincided
> the end of your support offering with the end of life of this last release.
> Which also ideally would have provided time for an omnios community to have
> developed and started producing their own releases before the last
> officially supported omniti version reached sunset.

So aether multiple companies with interest in OmniOS can step up and
start accepting contracts for maintain OmniOS for their customers and
quickly acquire and hire talents already available,
or create a new company/support group that can accept support contracts
then.

Additional to that solution would be to also to provide additional
developer time from the existing staff in companies using OmniOS, so
that code is contributed and releases are done by a constant contribution.
So companies grow out of "only  a customer" role and accept an active
role -it becomes product of your company too, if having at least one guy
also developing/partially maintain it on the payroll.

Second is more like how Openindiana functions and how illumos functions.
Company/companies and community members providing infrastructure and
build servers, and community including companies employees providing the
code and support, build and maintain.

___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Robert Treat]

Security updates are a little bit trickier than just pulling in
general upstream changes, but I think the ideal scenario would be to
form a group of interested people around the "secur...@omnios.org"
label which would collaborate on fielding and producing security fixes
for the project. Given we also have critical production systems
running OmniOS (more than most I suspect), we will need to deal with
security and bug fixes regardless, so we're happy to use those efforts
to bootstrap things.

Robert Treat

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 3:19 PM, Paul B. Henson  wrote:
> As both a home hobbyist user of OmniOS and a paid support user of OmniOS at
> my day job, I'd first like to thank you guys for putting together a great
> operating system that has served me well over the years and I hope will
> continue to do so.
>
> However, I would like to clarify your stance when you say you are
> "suspending active development" and that r151022 will be the "final
> release". Per your historical release cycle:
>
> https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/ReleaseCycle
>
> r151022 was to be an LTS release with security/bug fix support through H1
> 2020. While there will be no further releases of OmniOS from OmniTI, will
> you continue to back port fixes and fix issues in r151022 through that
> timeline, or will it be released as is and then be up to the as yet
> undeveloped community to do so? We currently have critical production
> systems deployed, systems whose deployment was only approved by management
> due to the availability of commercial support (the wisdom of such a
> perspective we will not discuss), and this sudden development is potentially
> going to leave us in quite a pickle. While I certainly can't dictate to you
> how to run your business, it would have been much easier on your customers
> had you made this announcement with the release of r151022, and coincided
> the end of your support offering with the end of life of this last release.
> Which also ideally would have provided time for an omnios community to have
> developed and started producing their own releases before the last
> officially supported omniti version reached sunset.
>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: OmniOS-discuss [mailto:omnios-discuss-boun...@lists.omniti.com]
>> On Behalf Of Robert Treat
>> Sent: Friday, April 21, 2017 7:07 AM
>> To: omnios-discuss 
>> Subject: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS
>>
>> Five years ago, when we first launched OmniOS, we did it out of a
>> direct need to push forward the OpenSolaris ecosystem that we had
>> built into the core of several parts of our business. At the time, the
>> illumos community was still rather new and taking direct control of
>> our path forward was a solid next step; we had already built many of
>> the pieces in-house that we needed to produce a complete operating
>> system distribution, and our experiences with open sourcing software
>> we worked on had been generally very good.
>>
>> While we didn't know quite what the reaction would be, there were two
>> things internally that guided us as long term factors in our decision.
>> First, as we have done for other open source software, we thought it
>> made sense to offer commercial support for OmniOS, but there was no
>> desire to "pivot" OmniTI to be an operating system vendor. We like the
>> world of building and running high-scale software and infrastructure
>> and that's where we wanted to stay. Hand in hand with that was the
>> second idea, that while we felt it was important for us to take the
>> first initial steps, in the long term we really would prefer that
>> OmniOS become an open source project maintained by its community
>> rather than remain as the open source product of a single commercial
>> entity (think Debian vs Red Hat, if that helps).
>>
>> Five years later, we are proud to see that this software has been
>> accepted by a wide group of companies and end users, and we think this
>> has been a boon for the illumos community, who are the shoulders we
>> build upon. When you see companies from all sectors and industry, both
>> small and some orders of magnitude larger, using the technology you
>> put forward to build even further; well, it's great to have an impact.
>>
>> However, even with the success we have had, there is one area we have
>> failed to make progress on, which is the goal of making OmniOS
>> community operated. There are many factors why this hasn't happened,
>> but ultimately in five years of both ups and downs within OmniTI, I am
>> left to conclude that if we are ever to change the nature of OmniOS,
>> we need to take a radical approach.
>>
>> Therefore, going forward, while some of our staff may continue
>> contributing, OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS.
>> Our next release, currently in beta, will become the final release
>> from OmniTI. We are currently going through steps to remove any build
>> dependencies on OmniTI or its 

Re: [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Tobias Oetiker]

So, there you have it ... software is not free, and for something as complex
and slick as OmniOS, there is serious money involved in keeping it at its
current level. 

It seems that OmniTI has not managed to get this message
across to the many organizations relying on OmniOS to run their
Servers.

Robert has suggested that he hopes that 'the community' will take up
the maintenance of omnios in the future ... but I wonder ... now that we know
what is going to happen. Do you think your organisation would be prepared
to spend some 'real bucks' on keeping OmniOS maintained professionally?

I think we would be looking at something like ~500k USD per year.

For 1-2 People to continue running the show.

I have setup a chat on Gitter ...


   https://gitter.im/PostOmniOS/Lobby

lets meet there and discuss.

cheers
tobi

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
www.oetiker.ch t...@oetiker.ch +41 62 775 9902
___
OmniOS-discuss mailing list
OmniOS-discuss@lists.omniti.com
http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss