[OmniOS-discuss] To the OmniOS Community

[Schweiss, Chip]

I just added my potential in paid support for OmniOS being maintained
professionally.   This spreadsheet does reveal the realities OmniTI was
facing with OmniOS.   My guess is they were never close to turning a profit
on it.

It saddens me to see such a well developed and maintained distribution go
unsupported.   I hope there is enough commercial potential that OmniOS gets
picked up to offer a supported distribution, but I don't expect there will
be.   OmniOS is, unfortunately, a niche product, that doesn't have enough
paying customer potential. Just as many others did, I initially started
using it as a platform to run ZFS storage.  It made much
more economical sense than buying into Nexenta in order to get a supported
platform.  ZFS is now much more mature on Linux and I suspect this
drastically reduces OmniOS's demand.

Dan McDonald and OmniTI put forward an excellent run at it.
Unfortunately, OmniOS was, for the most part, a one-man show that without
Dan will, by my best prediction, die a long slow death.   I'm sure there
will be some advancement by the community for several years to come, but
not at a pace and quality that can be tolerated by users like myself.

I give the credit to Dan, for the development of such a great distribution
of Illumos, and relentless effort to support it.  I do have to criticize
OmniTI for poor execution.   We were paid supporters of OmniOS, however,
things like sending out renewal invoices were never executed in a timely
manner and requests for quotes for additional server support were difficult
to get a response on.   I think in the three years we were paid supporters,
we probably only paid for two.

Should a new company offer a paid support contract for OmniOS with the
talent to back it up, I will very quickly get Washington University on
board.  If that doesn't happen in the next few months, I will start our
plan of moving or ZFS storage to another platform, that has long-term
viability and hopefully some sort of paid support.   That may mean getting
an independent contractor or consulting firm on retainer for emergency help
or dedicated patch development/maintenance.

-Chip

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 12:37 AM, Michael Rasmussen <mir at miras.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 14 May 2017 19:10:32 -0400
> Theo Schlossnagle <theo.schlossnagle at circonus.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Communities are built on collective need and contributed time. It comes
> > down to volunteering. I have yet to see anyone pledge time to do work,
> and
> > from my perspective that is what is truly needed here.
> >
> This is not entirely true since I some weeks ago did exactly that
> without specifying what I would do precisely.
>
> > I was hoping not to be the first, but I will attempt to lead by example.
> > I'll pledge my time to do required security package publications on 014
> and
> > 022. As security issues with packages in core arise, I will update the
> > build system, re-roll the packages and publish them.
> >
> To follow example I will commit myself to maintain the wiki and any
> other web based infrastructure the project may need and choose to have.
>
> --
> Hilsen/Regards
> Michael Rasmussen
>
> Get my public GnuPG keys:
> michael <at> rasmussen <dot> cc
> http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xD3C9A00E
> mir <at> datanom <dot> net
> http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE501F51C
> mir <at> miras <dot> org
> http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE3E80917
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> /usr/games/fortune -es says:
> Don't patch bad code - rewrite it.
>             - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plaugher)
>
> _______________________________________________
> OmniOS-discuss mailing list
> OmniOS-discuss at lists.omniti.com
> http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
>
>
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