[illumos-Discuss] Why did we fork Illumos? [Re: [osol-discuss] gdamore wishes he knew what would motivate more developers to work on illumos bugs....]

[Robert Milkowski]

Hi,

I haven't contributed (yet?) to Illumos although I did contributed in 
many ways to Open Solaris in the past.
I'm also watching Illumos very closely.

Despite lack of any contribution to Illumos on my part I feel strongly 
to defend Garret.
 From what I've seen here so far he is actually doing pretty well.
And if it wasn't for him and Nexenta nothing probably would have happened.
Or at least he has delivered and keeps doing a great job.

I would advise anyone to try contributing here first and then if for 
some reason it doesn't work think about forking. The only big dispute 
I've seen here was between Joerg and the rest. And frankly, while he is 
a really good programmer he is rather very hard to interact with, be it 
Open Solaris, Linux or Illumos communities. At least this has been my 
observation over many years. I definitely wouldn't base my opinion on 
Illumos or Garret's leadership on interaction with Joerg.

Whatever project you are working on, imho it is almost always better to 
at least try to join efforts here rather then fork, at least for now. 
And hey, forking is easy and you can do it at any time in the future for 
whatever reason.

I also agree with many others that stat while a really good piece of 
software, doesn't really belong in Illumos. Same applies for mutt, 
alpine, firefox, etc. They belong in distributions.
I'm pretty sure that star and other excellent programs he wrote will 
end-up (if they haven't already) in OpenIndiana and other distributions 
based on Illumos. But it really doesn't belong here.

While this is not entirely the same but still - would you expect star to 
be integrated into Linux kernel project? I don't think so.


Best regards,
  Robert Milkowski