Joe Brockmeier: “The most valuable thing I’ve learned watching Fedora is this: Patience. It takes time and steady, incremental growth to build a solid community. If you’d asked me two years into Fedora’s development whether the project would succeed, I’d have been somewhat skeptical, but looking at the project five years down the road, I’m convinced.”
Do you think the ‘opening’ of the core is inevitable ?
I feel that the end of OS/2 as a business for IBM marked the transition. Nobody would buy OS/2 any more, for the same reason that nobody would buy typewriters any more … everyone who wanted one had one, and ‘leading’ customers were using the next generation product.
Linux, of course.
Users have always contributed tweaks to a manufacturer’s product, to be integrated by those manufacturers who have listened. Happened to OS/2, and happens to Microsoft Windows, as well.
I think OpenSolaris can win and get a massive community going in the longrun if we compromise a little bit in certain areas where the rest of the Unix and Linux community have already adopted a uniform standard. A good example is networking utilities:
The default packet sniffing utility that came with OpenSolaris 2008.05 was “snoop”. I personally love snoop, however every other Unix and Linux based operating system (FreeBSD, AIX, OpenBSD, HP-UX, Mac OS X, every Linux distro, etc.) has already adopted the Berkeley “tcpdump” utility as the universal standard. As a result, I have a hard time persuading any of my friends to use OpenSolaris 2008.05 because in any Unix-like operating system, they are used to tcpdump already being there after a minimal installation and they don’t want to spend a lot of time compiling it from source just so that they can use it to help debug network issues after a fresh install. And think about this- when students nowadays go to college and take a class on networking, they learn all of their TCP/IP networking skills in a computer lab using tcpdump on a computer that has Linux or FreeBSD installed on it. The only people who use snoop are a minority of long-time solaris users, so tcpdump has become the universal standard.
Same thing with the “arping” utility (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arping ). Anybody I know who does any kind of TCP/IP related work on the job is extremely dependent on this little utility being already there for network troubleshooting, even when using “Live CD’s” like Knoppix or any other kinds of live distro. OpenSolaris doesn’t have arping, so I can’t get any network administrators or datacenter techs to seriously consider using it just for that one reason: they need arping to do their jobs. When a server is not replying to ping (ICMP echo requests) because Windows firewall is turned on, arping is sometimes the only way to make sure that the server has good network connectivity. And it is also the only good way I have found for troubleshooting ip conflicts on the network as the “arp -a” has let me down a few times when it came to finding out who was hijacking another customer’s IP address.
So, how do we as an OpenSolaris community solve these problems? Well, I for one think that getting rid of the old Solaris utilities like “snoop” is definitely a bad idea. We want people who have been using Solaris for 20 years to still love OpenSolaris and still feel at home using snoop and all of their other old tools from 10 years ago. But why not have both “snoop” and “tcpdump” included in the default live CD installation of OpenSolaris 2008.11? Why not include “arping” too? They are all free software released under the BSD license. The older Solaris versions used to have one directory with BSD utilities and one directory with System V utilities, why not bring that back in OpenSolaris?
Just because we have both “snoop” and “tcpdump” in 2008.11 doesn’t make OpenSolaris 2008.11 bloatware. These are lightweight text-based command line utilities that hardly take up any space. And if we need to make more room on the 700 MB live CD, we can always get rid of Thunderbird and require users to type in:
$pfexec pkg install thunderbird
to install it. As of right now, OpenSolaris 2008.05 is unpopular among datacenter techs and network administrators because it doesn’t have the necessary tools like tcpdump, arping, wireshark, etc. that every tech needs to troubleshoot TCP/IP networking problems. I would like to change that and make OpenSolaris the best operating system ever, and I think including tcpdump and arping in 2008.11 might bring us closer to that goal.
Thanks for listening.
Just a thot… one thing that should be learned from the open source community is that you don’t just remove functionality – there’s always someone who wants this or that utility, no matter how ancient. One approach is to package those utilities in such a way as to give people the choice to install them – maximum flexibility = GOOOOOOD. This is one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about Ubuntu (any debian-based system, really) is the amount of flexibility one has in configuring the system. If this could be built on top of the solaris base, I’m sold!
Roland