Sent from my iPhone On Dec 23, 2012, at 4:27 PM, Chris Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 04:57 +1100, Darren Reed wrote: >> Are you saying that OpenSolaris without Sun is/was meaningless? >> >> If the single commercial backer disappears from an open source project >> disappears and the community then dies how is it possible to view the >> community as a success? >> >> One hopes that IllumOS will be more resilient in that regard. >> >> Darren >> > > Illumos is resilient and certainly has a future as long as the community > stays optimistic. > > It was brought up earlier in the week the issue of Illumos requiring a > new and proper reference OS distribution. I believe this is what is > holding back Illumos uptake and to entice new developers to get > involved. I believe this has been a contributing issue for some time. > And not to mention the wiki and website, which could both do with some > updating. > > That's just my 2 cents as an outside observer of Illumos. > > Regards > Chris Jones I think there is some truth to this. Developers want their code to be used by someone... otherwise, it is a waste of time, which can never be retrieved since our lives are finite. There needs to be ISV's who are willing to use it. ISV's produce a product, which is sold through marketing & sales to end users to solve a problem. They provide [controlled] feedback to the underlying developers. > Users have needs [business requirements] which is satisfied. An OS does not satisfy a business requirement, software which rides on top of that OS satisfies the need. Honestly, a proprietary packaging system, with the greatest features in the world, does not attract ISV's and SW developers. A standard, well documented, open source packaging system, that ISV's are familiar with gets us closer. I am going to use some aggressive language... IPS does not satisfy these points, in my perspective. Illumos has the bastard-child remnants of a [now] closed source solution that no one else (besides some in this community) uses, former ISV's are not interested in supporting, thus limits user in the community, and limits future developer injection. Choosing to remain on IPS means closed source Solaris will continue to change, and we will be slightly incompatible. This will not benefit ISV's or user community or future developers. Choosing a packaging system based on a core not used by any viable commercial OS will not draw ISV's. This leaves us with enhancing SVR4 or choosing another open source alternative (which may or may not accept contributions from an OpenSolaris derivative, which they may see as competitive.) In the end, since we have SVR4 packaging, source is open, it is well adopted by ISV's, and user communities are aware of it - it seems to be suicide to follow any other path. We could be the group to drive open sourced SVR4 packaging, without breaking various licenses, since kernel linking is not required. There is very little needed to drive incremental improvement. Tack on dependence checking and move on... base it on a hack (OpenSolaris contributed code, OpenCSW, IPS code, whatever) - and move forward using a iterative model for improving things behind the scenes, since ISV's and Users won't care (as long as it works.) Adding SVCS support can be just a packaging convention, no code change. The longer we wrangle with this, the less relevant IPS is, as Oracle diverges. Thanks, Dave ------------------------------------------- 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
