> So if by asking me to "turn in" you are asking me to forsake my own engineering values for purposes of your comfort, well, no, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen.
Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and commitment is extremely admirable.
My suggestion is merely that it's perhaps time to acknowledge that the market is not going to adopt illumos in a major way. An outflow of that is considering the possibility that the considerable engineering resources at your command may be better deployed in attempting to instill and carry forth the same crucial, badly-needed principles and values into projects that have more realistic prospects, to the extent possible, rather than remaining 1000% committed to a lost cause, where the principles and values will flare out in obscurity. "If a tree falls in the forest..."
illumos is an immense contribution to our collective engineering heritage and I entertain no illusion that it should be totally iced. Personally I would consider it a glorious resurgence to see it more widely adopted, and to see it become the basis of a new generation of systems. SmartOS is simply a joy compared to the train wreck that passes for systems management in today's mainstream, and I sincerely hope that the wheels turn to make it a more viable option. The ongoing open-source contributions of the faithful volunteer keepers of the flame will be invaluable in leaving that possibility open.
While there is no doubt that illumos's open-source heritage ensures it will live on, we must be realistic and admit that for all practical intents and purposes, the sun has set on the project's general commercial viability (at least for the time being -- the thing about sunsets is, they're followed by sunrises).
The question I pose is whether your advocacy may be more effective in bringing the values and contributions of yourself and your team in force to more active venues, than by continuing to toil in the last fleeting fragments of the twilight of Solaris's commercial viability.
I personally know many young engineers who admire your talks but have no exposure to the actual process of working with you directly. What would change if they got that? Would there be a Cantrill Youth? What's the likelihood of passing on that flame within illumos v. expanding your horizons to other groups?
There’s a gap in perspectives here, I think, which is roughly similar to that between Minix and Linux. Software doesn’t always have to compromise to pragmatism, because there’s nothing requiring that software be developed to be used.
Sometimes a reference implementation is intended to be just that, and nothing more—a reference, for other implementors of other systems to crib ideas from, especially as pertains to how the smaller ideas cohere architecturally in practice (which is hard to communicate by just writing papers about the individual ideas, or building them as standalone libraries, or building them into other systems where they must interoperate with components that don’t cohere into the desired architecture.)
Or, to put that another way: sometimes the best textbook is the codebase of a good implementation. And some people are more interested in writing those textbooks, than in personally getting their ideas into production systems. Especially because it’s far easier to refine the ideas in the context of such a coherent presentation of them.
Someone else, who reads such a “textbook” codebase, can put the ideas to work. But the ideas themselves will be better-developed for having had time to stew in the same pot as other novel ideas. This serves the people who put the ideas into practice as well.
Also, software doesn't have to be developed to spread widely.
I'm sure they're fine with it being Their Own OS that's only actually used for the Samsung Internal Cloud Thingy, while the source is public for anyone to take so it won't disappear from history.
whynotboth.gif. illumos can continue in purity while the full-time team interacts with others. That is the best way to see the principles can be successfully grafted in -- show that they have practical and immediate utility in the real world, even if they can't be implemented wholesale overnight. A pure textbook implementation is great as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, especially in today's highly-competitive internal engineering environments.
Sometimes it's worth fighting for to the end if that something you're fighting for is the right thing. And sometimes what happens is that the right thing does win out in the end, because it's better.
You're asking Rembrandt to stop painting realistic paintings because Picasso nowadays generally passes for art. What you don't consider is that there is nothing stopping Rembrandt from continuing to paint his realistic paintings for his own sake and pleasure.
Of course I'm not suggesting that you forsake your values. I'm sure anyone who has followed you for any amount of time knows that will never happen. There is no stronger advocate for the principles upon which your work is based, and your fervor and commitment is extremely admirable.
My suggestion is merely that it's perhaps time to acknowledge that the market is not going to adopt illumos in a major way. An outflow of that is considering the possibility that the considerable engineering resources at your command may be better deployed in attempting to instill and carry forth the same crucial, badly-needed principles and values into projects that have more realistic prospects, to the extent possible, rather than remaining 1000% committed to a lost cause, where the principles and values will flare out in obscurity. "If a tree falls in the forest..."
illumos is an immense contribution to our collective engineering heritage and I entertain no illusion that it should be totally iced. Personally I would consider it a glorious resurgence to see it more widely adopted, and to see it become the basis of a new generation of systems. SmartOS is simply a joy compared to the train wreck that passes for systems management in today's mainstream, and I sincerely hope that the wheels turn to make it a more viable option. The ongoing open-source contributions of the faithful volunteer keepers of the flame will be invaluable in leaving that possibility open.
While there is no doubt that illumos's open-source heritage ensures it will live on, we must be realistic and admit that for all practical intents and purposes, the sun has set on the project's general commercial viability (at least for the time being -- the thing about sunsets is, they're followed by sunrises).
The question I pose is whether your advocacy may be more effective in bringing the values and contributions of yourself and your team in force to more active venues, than by continuing to toil in the last fleeting fragments of the twilight of Solaris's commercial viability.
I personally know many young engineers who admire your talks but have no exposure to the actual process of working with you directly. What would change if they got that? Would there be a Cantrill Youth? What's the likelihood of passing on that flame within illumos v. expanding your horizons to other groups?