> Am 26.03.2015 um 06:27 schrieb Martin Bochnig <[email protected]>:
>
> Hi Nikola,
>
>> Glad to see you back on the list Martin, you are welcome sharing your views.
>
> thank you, I'm glad to hear that (although it may not be representative for
> this list).
>
>
>> OI is in need of source contributors testing and maintaining.
>> I am glad you are using CDDL for code contributions, as per release
>> notes and I like your dedication to support SPARC.
>
> 90% of the work I did since 2013 was closely related to amd64 (x86/x64-only),
> rather than sparc.
> But probably it will take 25 further years until somebody starts to figure
> this out.
The situation regarding the OpenSolaris derivatives as I see it is:
- there are a few Desktop oriented distributions: openindiana,
OpenSXCE, TribbliX, XStreamOS, DilOS (did i forget any?)
- there are a few server oriented distributions (OmniOs, SmartOS,
Nexentra OS, and some more)
To my knowledge the server oriented distributions are being developed by
companies, some of them feeding illumos.
Despite XStreamOS none of the desktop distributions are supported or even run
by companies.
All of them share some problems:
- publicity (probably >99% of computer users don’t even know that they
exist)
- missing drivers (especially desktop would need more and better
graphics support (eg. Intel and AMD), USB 3.0).
- few developers (especially for the desktop derivatives)
The companies involved try to enhance or add functionality that their customers
need (mostly network card and HBA drivers).
Alas they don’t seem to see the desktop valuable and gave up - desktop users
should/could use other operating systems.
For the server side we have some arguments to attract possible users: advanced
technologies like ZFS, SMF, FMA, …
But these are not so interesting for desktop users. Here we have somehow a
chicken-egg-problem:
To attract more users we need wider support for drivers and desktop
applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.
In order to get this we need either more money (to pay developers) or more
voluntary work.
But we will only get it when we attract more users and thus more developers...
I don’t know how many users we have; especially the number of desktop users
seem to be very low (are there more than 50?).
There might be more users for the server oriented distributions but compared to
the numbers of BSDs or even Linux the number is for sure marginal.
(BTW this is an explanation for the low donations Martin gets - there is simply
not enough people knowing the desktop distributions (and finding them
attractive).)
So the question is: how can we change the situation?
Andreas
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