I was just reading through the oi-dev archives (about the resignation of the OI lead) where a former Sun engineer, claimed that the efforts made by sun to port OpenSolaris to the desktop/laptop platforms (by adding wifi support, by making a new audio system, etc), only hurt Sun in the long run, and that it was all for nothing.
I agree that it probably hurt Sun in the long run. But I promise that it was not for nothing. I started using OpenSolaris some time in 2006 or 2007. I was 16 then, and didn't know anything about programming. The availability of the OpenSolaris distribution, is what gave me, a mere mortal, the ability to store files in a 3-way ZFS mirror (a teen would not be able to afford an enterprise RAID card). To play with DTrace and illuminate the inner workings of the system. OpenSolaris is the platform that I started writing my first serious code on. It is the platform that I write code on to this day. It was and still is a joy to use DTrace daily, and to transport data between machines as ZFS datasets, and not as tar-balls. It is bliss to have inline compression and deduplication. Fast and free snapshots. Most Illumos devs take these things for granted. They are all professional engineers, whom I respect deeply. But in 2006 I was a mere teenager, who was merely enthusiastic about administering unix-like systems. I guess switching between Linux distros, and being different made me feel "elite". But the truth is, I was a pretender. I was a mere hobbyist, looking for a distraction. Something that would make life less boring and humdrum. I meandered about the web, not knowing what kind of distraction I was looking for. Funny youtube videos? Yeah those were okay. But they got stale and weren't as stimulating. Video games? Stimulating, but tiring. Not fulfilling. Almost masturbatory in nature. Porn? Same as video games, though slightly more effective. Going out / hanging out? Only in short bursts. Doing it constantly made me tired and fatigued. Setting up a Linux distro had its own kind of high. It lasted longer. But once you've set up a distro, you can't really leave it alone. You either have to try another distro, or upgrade the existing distro. I can't explain how I longed for upgrades. Especially on Gentoo. That was the high of _assembling_ something that worked. Of making an otherwise blank machine come to life, and operate in a customized manner. (As customized a manner as possible for a non-coder). But it wasn't until I tried OpenSolaris that I made a decision to learn to code proficiently. For several reasons. The burst of innovation that came with OpenSolaris (ZFS, DTrace, etc), made me aware that software/computing had unsolved problems (or problems in need of better solutions). The availability of DTrace, and the prospect of being able to see what the machine is doing (and hence what my own code is doing), was too tempting a technology to ignore. I understood that the technologies in OpenSolaris would best facilitate my new-found need to create, to build, to engineer solutions to problems. Namely my problems, but problems nonetheless. But if OpenSolaris were not usable on the desktop -- If it didn't have support for things like audio and wifi -- I would never have considered it. I would never have decided that writing code might be a good idea. I would have never discovered one of the most exhilarating, blissful, and strangest activities that we humans have come up with. Coding has been the most profound and intense experience of my life. I don't know exactly when it started changing me, I just know that it did. And I am glad it did. If I hadn't chanced down the OpenSolaris road, I probably would have ended up an uninspired burnout, a wasted bag of cells. If Illumos were to disappear from the desktop. Or even from the world. I would be disappointed. But I would move on, because I already know the bliss of writing code, and I'll do it elsewhere, even if the environment and tools are not as agreeable. One wouldn't be able to stop a writer from writing his heart out, by taking away his typewriter and giving him a quill and parchment. But when I think that there is some kid out there who is bored out of his skull and wandering aimlessly, because, quite frankly, he is too smart for average activities, who may never learn the joys of the art of programming because some developers decided that they're content letting Illumos's basic desktop capabilities atrophy over time as new devices replace old devices... well, my heart breaks. Because these kids might be those that never get inspired, and waste their lives on stupidity. I'm not saying that the Illumos engineers are doing the wrong thing. In fact I think they are all doing the right things. I hope Illumos retains the desktop essentials (usb1/2/3/N, wifi, audio, modern browser); that's all that's needed to get someone started down the path of writing code. Desktop Illumos isn't supposed to replace Ubuntu and Mac. It is supposed to attract a certain kind of personality, that will _create_ more than they consume. (believe me, I'm writing fascinating code, that I'm not ready to reveal yet; well, I find it fascinating). All I am saying is that those seemingly useless projects (wifi, audio) undertaken by Sun, were not useless to me, and not useless to Illumos. And I suspect such projects will not be useless to future generations of engineers, and future revisions of Illumos. My apologies if this email is discombobulated or off-topic (it is very late here, and I am out of coffee). But I needed to respond, and offer opposition to the idea that desktop capabilities were without benefit. Especially since I was one of the (presumably many) beneficiaries of OpenSolaris. The benefit is happening at the edges of graph. And I think that this benefit will ripple back to the center of the graph, when the inspired amateurs, begin contributing code and seeking jobs at companies that hire Illumos talent. Thanks to everyone from Sun and the Illumos community. _______________________________________________ oi-dev mailing list oi-dev@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev