OpenIndiana project leader resigns

G

gpatrick

Alasdair Lumsden, OpenIndiana project leader's resignation.

http://lwn.net/Articles/514046/
"...right from the very beginning, upset me, was the lack
of interest from the large commercial players benefiting from Illumos,
and from those who had been paid to work on Solaris at Sun."

"Right from the very beginning, Illumos was on life-support."

"Nobody in their right mind would use OI..."
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Garrett D’Amore, illumos Founder's response to OpenIndiana project leader resigning. One quote in particular seems to signal the finality of OI.

http://gdamore.blogspot.com/2012/08/...signation.html
"While OpenIndiana served to carry on the banner of the OpenSolaris distribution, it was obviously a dead end..."
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Not surprising

I've tried OpenIndiana and OpenSolaris a few times over the years and they always feel out of date, heavy, unpolished. Yes, the OS has some good features, but those features have been ported to FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, both of which have better hardware support. I always came away from OpenIndiana wondering, "Why would I use this instead of FreeBSD?" and I never really found a reason. They had some nice tools like the Timeslider and GUI driver manager, but for the most part they felt stuck in the past when compared to FreeBSD and the various Linux distros.

I think it's great Sun open sourced Solaris, I wish they had done it sooner in fact, but the community around it never really took hold the way other source projects have and I think that's a shame.
 
NewGuy said:
I always came away from OpenIndiana wondering, "Why would I use this instead of FreeBSD?"
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e.g. ZFS/STMF/COMSTAR - SCSI framework and iSCSI implementation. You just can't find any other OS which does this better. This is just the way it should be done.

I don't care about desktop - there are (at least I think) two solid products one can buy and use for desktop (or use any free solutions if they prefer). But Illumos/OI has a lot to offer to open-source server solutions.

Luckily FreeBSD is using some of those features already (I know it has nothing to do with luck but rather hard-working developers porting it here).
 
matoatlantis said:
e.g. ZFS/STMF/COMSTAR - SCSI framework and iSCSI implementation. You just can't find any other OS which does this better. This is just the way it should be done.
Click to expand...

Might I add beadm along what you already mentioned ZFS/STMF/COMSTAR, i used them at work a lot back when Opensolaris was still a Sun product. You could deploy Opensolaris in working environments, because in case something went wrong in a new build you had a beadm backup close so no harm done if you didn't upgrade the ZFS pool.

When Oracle bought Sun, and Opensolaris became once again ClosedSolaris, I enjoyed the fact that Illumos/OpenIndiana continued the work. But now after two years since it's debut the develpment was slow: they initial plan to have a Final build in one year. Now two years latter now they are still in early beta ...

Considering this things I'm not surprised the project leader resigned. I Remember how much fuss was about the project two years ago, but now it just died out. It died because except Nexenta Illumos project didn't have any big name behind them.
 
I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has ZFS and beadm. OI did it first, but now that FreeBSD has these technologies, OpenIndiana doesn't seem to have any special features to attract users.
 
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