[OmniOS-discuss] illumos and contributions metrics: how to evaluate companies that commercialize illumos based products by examining them in the light of their illumos community's contributions.

[Davide Poletto]

Hi all,

maybe I'm a little bit fool to ask such type of general question here...yes
- I know - probably the illumos user's mailing list is the proper place to
ask what I'm trying to explore here...but I feel comfortable to place my
doubts here first (just see below why).

At first sight it looks definitely Off Topic in regard with OmniOS and -
also - not relevant to OmniOS (and OmniTI) in itself...so first of
all...really *pardon me* if I jumped in with this type of generic doubts
*but*, at the same time, I hope that, among others, Dan McDonald will read
and give me (and us) his opinion about what I'm going to ask...since I
recently read - and here it's the point for me that legitimates the
discussion here - *his* interesting presentation "2015 illumos Day" (I
found it at http://kebe.com/~danmcd/illumos-day-2015.pdf).

All my interest started once I've read it and, particularly, when I started
to think about the relevance of two slides: the "Non-Upstreamed Technical
Changes" and "Bad Reasons for Not Upstreaming" slides captured my curiosity
exactly while I was in the process of evaluate a NAS/SAN appliance
intensively developed by a relatively young European company. The appliance
I'm referring to, despite the company's marketing approach avoided to refer
to expected terms such "illumos" or "ZFS", is clearly illumos based and
uses, among other value added proprietary technologies, illumos kernel and
ZFS as foundations for all other high level added features/services.

This is quite normal, nothing new here you would say (I add it's sad to see
that particular type of marketing approach in use: to apparently hide the
evidence of your roots not because it is evident enough but because it
isn't a useful topic that help to sell...this, at least, is my perception).

The statement "Even if for a limited time, elapsed time increases
upstreaming difficulty" of the second slide cited above hit my imagination:
so I started to look at some illumos forked repositories (often those
companies have one on GitHub, to cite only the illumos part forgetting
other illumos related projects they may have forked) and the only evident
fact I was able to note immediately is a probable relationship with the
"This branch is n commits behind illumos:master." GitHub assertion...where
the number "n" may (or may not) be an index of how much the company's
project (illumos in this case) has diverged since its initial
fork...leaving me with the impression that all possible related (bad/good)
consequences are going to have a real (bad/good) impact on the future of
the product/project especially if I want to find a relationship between
those possible consequences and what is going to happen on the master
branch (think about how fast things are changing when speaking about ZFS or
the illumos kernel development).

Maybe that only parameter (the n commits behind) is not enough to form a
valid opinion and start to speculate: "The company X develops, produces,
markets, sells and supports illumos based products but, looking at how much
behind their illumos fork is with respect to the illumos master branch,
that is not enough...what's about their grade of contributions to the
community? how good their product/support/development will then be if they
tend to diverge from the community?" and so on with similar questions.

I've also read the interesting "Illumos Productivity and Bus Factor"
illumetric blog entry (available at
https://illumetrics.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/illumos-productivity-and-bus-factor/)
but I didn't found a way to easily understand - as user - if a company is
acting well in terms of commits done and why it is (or it is not) doing
so...or to easily understand if its "public market image" finds a weighted
counterpart in its community image (through the contributions it could give
back to the entire illumos community).

This approach could be also extended/applied to institutions too, I mean
not only to commercial companies seen as special or particular entities
(remembering that committers are individuals that, mostly, work for
companies or for institutions)...but I'm now focused about companies that
sells illumos based technology because they creates profits also through
the essential software components they use as foundation of their products.

Illumetrics released a framework for calculating statistics on illumos
related repositories and data sources (see it here:
https://github.com/nickziv/illumetrics) but, as they stated, it is far from
complete (it seems to consider only contributions made by known names that
reference to yet well known companies without considering also
young/emerging ones in the count). That's not an illumetrics fault, that's
clear...simply the "data cluster" is still little to infer generically
about all illumos forked public projects.

So, after this long preamble, here my legitimate question: is there a way
to easily evaluate how good (and in which way) a commercial company - which
naturally attracts system administrators' attention with their products
(once and especially because those administrators realize that those
products are illumos based) - is in "giving back" (if it does) to the
illumos community (or to related communities) when that exact company
develops, produces, markets and sells appliances by - at best -
technically/commercially hiding (or by tending to hide or tending to not
sufficiently promote with the necessary transparency) the fact that their
products are essentially based and developed on a illumos fork?

What I'm asking here are not names but metrics or, eventually, metrics'
results...to help me form a partial but reasonable opinion.

Is there a way to rank/evaluate and so reward/honour (by, as example,
purchasing their products or by sustaining their development as
testers/free-time contributors) those {individuals, companies,
institutions} that clearly demonstrate not only to have good numbers
(commits) but also that they care about the community and that are more
transparent than others in advertising their commercial offer's origin?

Kind regards, Davide.
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