I certainly hope you are right. But I also hope you are aware of
survival bias that may "color" your past experiences. It is very easy to
look at the successful projects that have managed to survive over the
years in retrospect while forgetting about those project that died and
fell into oblivion.
I guess it should come to no surprise that most people who use open
source software don't care. Probably the vast majority don't know about
Alasdair Lumsden's resignation, let alone that he exists. That's why one
should take into consideration that for every 100 or so new users 2-5 of
them may eventually start contributing and developing for Illumos. I
think incentives such as career opportunities and other things that make
Illumos and OpenIndiana look "cool" should be important to stress.
Perhaps it would be possible to convince the freeNAS people to use
Illumos/OpenIndana instead.
On 2012-09-01 16:48, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Sat, 1 Sep 2012, Robin Axelsson wrote:
I'm fully aware of the power of the command line and it is the
command line that really makes me like Unix based OSes (including
Linux). But making OI look well-polished with a fancy and easy to
administer web-admin GUI that would encourage the average-Joe to use
it as a home-NAS / virtual server is not a bad thing. That way OI
would reach a higher penetration with a larger user-base and most
importantly; it will get _free advertising_. To some extent the old
adage "A good product markets itself" has some truth in it. But it
must not only be good, it has to /look/ good so that even a less
versed person will understand how good it is.
Focusing on issues like this would be putting the cart before the
horse. It is more important to be able to easily build everything and
incorporate updates than to have a fancy configuration GUI. OI
popularity should come second to correct functionality and having an
organization (of volunteers and corporate entities) to sustain it. If
OI is worthy, popularity will follow, even if only from people who
already preferred Solaris.
OpenIndiana is still very young. Successful OS distributions take
quite a few years to become significant. It is not something which
happens in just a couple of years.
Bob
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