Christopher Chan wrote:
On Saturday, November 20, 2010 07:56 AM, Gary wrote:
I'm replying to this thread here instead of on the developer lest
someone issue me a netiquette citation for being off topic. How do you
quantify something like that? Even if you have some industry confirmed
sales numbers comparable to IDC tracking desktop PC and notebook
sales, how do you figure out just how many users a server has
regardless of its operating system? Does a web server have a half
dozen users because there are two sysadmins, two content providers,
and two developers? Or does it have 10 million unique visitors every
day and therefore have ten million and six users? Whenever I see this
comment it boggles my mind -- especially when in the context of Unix
systems regardless of flavor. For example, the commercial OSes that
have sold licenses based on 10 users or unlimited users. Ten users of
what? Shell accounts? Ten entries in the password file? What does that
mean and how can you claim that one OS has more "users" than any
another?
I think we can safely assume this to mean installations. Number of
people that actually use the installation would seriously inflate the
numbers. If we go by the latter, you have more than 750 users of
OpenIndiana already from just my installations alone.
Thanks Chris, you've perfectly understook this even without knowing the context I
said it.
<rant on>
In some communities it's becoming really hard to open your mouth without risking
to be flamed...
</rant off>
But in the context, I told that if OI wants to innovate, a support from some big
companies is a requirement.
And to explain what innovate means, in my mind, I'm thinking about things like
improving the kernel threads model, or creating new features, *from scratch* as
did Sun, features like ZFS, DTrace, zones and so...
Examples of inovation mentionned at oi-dev list are adding KDE, or removing the
question "are you in a sub net" when using "zlogin -C" for the first time. In my
mind, these are just examples of integration solutions, hacks, or similar things,
not innovations...
So, to really innovate, at research level, you shall be funded and supported by
someone, with a team big enough and with required skills... Not just a small hand
of integrators, as it seems we have here.
Examples of FOSS supported by big companies are are Fedora, postfix, sendmail (for
some time) ...
And, as I said, if the number of, say, installations, is very low, it's harder to
get some support from big companies...
Just a complement, I'm not expecting OI to remain, in the future, fully compatible
with Solaris, as I think it will undoubtely diverge. I expect OI to be just an
alternative to Oracle Solaris. In the same way that creating a new OS 100 %
compatible with Microsoft Windows is something nobody is looking for.
Well, I'll close my mouth, from now...
Regards,
José-Marcio
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