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Brendan, thanks very much for replying to this. It's great to get clarity around it. Your blog and HN posts have been great resources as I've gone down this rab

Brendan, thanks very much for replying to this. It's great to get clarity around it. Your blog and HN posts have been great resources as I've gone down this rabbit hole, and since I've read so many of them, I know that's not the first time you've heard it. Your work has been hugely valuable to this community. Since the options for illumos employment are and were scant, the story that you were looking for a change of scenery and it just-so-happened to entail Linux is somewhat believable. I appreciate you clearing up the record on that; it seems like now it's clear that you left over doubts and uncertainties about the value of illumos itself. The real key question is why, as Linux caught up to these features that you've listed, illumos wasn't pushing the envelope even farther, adding more features that you could continue to get excited about and continue to evangelize. I think that's the key missing piece for me. It seems like that loss of faith had to be pretty momentous if you were willing to shift attention to Linux and spend years helping to develop eBPF, replicating the core featureset that already existed via DTrace. So I'm trying to understand how to interpret that, and whether your departure + the departure of other key ex-Sun personnel around the same time should be taken as a clear vote of no confidence in illumos and/or other Solaris-derived products (potentially precipitated by a company-internal event that demonstrated this obviously, but which the rest of us don't know about), or whether that's too much to read into it based on associated personal factors. This is important to me as a potential platform adherent because as awesome as Bryan seems, illumos is a harder sell when he's standing alone as one of its sole prominent proponents, whereas everyone else who was involved with OpenSolaris back in the day has accepted the reality of Linux dominance and moved on. ----- EDIT: Hope we don't end up talking past each other in edits, but yeah, the thing that's been hard for me piecing this together is that it doesn't seem like there's any closure. Seemed like in a short period of time, you went from touting illumos frequently to never mentioning it unless it was to tell people that you don't think they should use it anymore. I'm trying to bridge that gap from the breadcrumbs left online, but thus far, coming up without satisfactory answers. There is still a tension here that I haven't been able to resolve. With the post from last year, you talk about things like it's a forgone conclusion that Solaris and its derivatives are over and done. This makes your position sharper but it doesn't really help with a context or pathway for why that conclusion is so crisp when illumos and Joyent are still apparently viable. I understand that the tone is conciliatory because you're trying to cheer up the Sun folks who got caught up in the layoff, and show them that there is light on the Linux side of things. But no mention of illumos at all? No "Hey, Bryan has some openings over there if you're still into the Solaris thing, I used to work for him and it was alright, he'll give me 500 smackers if he hires someone and you say you read about it on this blog"? A little weird. You even do this in the parent comment here, where you describe time spent discussing illumos/Solaris as "down the Solaris drain", i.e., anything Solaris is non-productive. Why is it now "the Solaris drain"? Bryan and Joyent are trying to convince me that it's not a drain. I know that Linux "caught up", but that doesn't feel like the only explanation here. There's something else. After all, you still speak highly of FreeBSD, which also lags Linux in several significant ways. If it's just personal, I'm not asking you to get into the details and spread gossip, etc., but would be great to hear from you that "I just personally lost interest in that", "it was just about better employability on the Linux side, Solaris is still cool if that floats your boat, just doesn't float mine anymore", etc. instead of just hearing generic hand-wavy stuff from Bryan, who can't give the real deal as long as he wants to keep his job. It just feels like there something else here that's not out. I want to know what it is before I start running production applications on these platforms!

bcantrill 9y ago
I'm definitely not trying to be "hand-wavy"; apologies if it's taken that way. So let me make this slightly blunter: our goal in SmartOS and illumos is to solve systems problems -- and yes, we do it with the courage to go our own way where we see fit. If that worldview is a match for you, that's awesome. If that's not a match for you, that's fine too -- world domination is not, in fact, our goal. Yes, we are a small community, but that's fine with us: this is all open source; it's not going away. As an aside, I personally don't understand why anyone would choose to spend their time denigrating small communities; if you want to write your software in (say) OCaml and deploy it on OpenBSD via a Nix derivative, why should anyone spend their time telling you that you are wasting yours? (These are three examples of communities that -- like SmartOS -- are small but technically interesting.) And more importantly: why should you (or anyone, really) listen to a person who has defined themselves so negatively and so rigidly? Your technology choices -- like the books you like or the movies you enjoy or the ideas you have -- are your business; don't let anyone browbeat your choices out of you simply because they don't match their own.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  I see the small community in illumos as a benefit, more or less. I'm not trying to denigrate it for its size. The issue is the attrition, the apparently-negative momentum, and the loss of prominent proponents and distributors, including Brendan, OmniTI, etc. That's bad when something is already small. It makes people wonder why others are fleeing. My concern, as it relates to this thread, is around the spectacular loss of faith that Brendan has exhibited. You don't go from being a world-recognized authority on DTrace like Brendan to a Linux refugee overnight, especially not 3 years ago when you have to lay out all the plumbing for eBPF yourself. So something happened. That's clear. I want to know what it is, at least proximally / vaguely, because if it can drive Brendan away from illumos, I assume it can also drive away those of us who are less involved. If it was simply a personal dispute and had nothing to do with technical direction, that, of course, is one thing that doesn't reflect badly on illumos at all. People burn out sometimes, they want a change of scenery, whatever. But Brendan appears to stringently believe that illumos is now a bad choice in virtually all circumstances. It feels like there's something substantial at play. I don't think he's petty enough to bash the illumos kernel just because he had a spat or wanted to mix things up, especially considering it contains a not-insignificant portion of his own work. I don't necessarily expect either of you to reveal details, and obviously, I respect that you have both moral and legal obligations as it relates to confidentiality surrounding personnel matters. I'm just talking about my read on the situation, and why I'm skittish, despite what I feel are some strong positives in SmartOS's favor. A world where Bryan Cantrill is the lone SmartOS holdout, after his compatriots have declared it a lost cause, is just nerve-wracking. I'm sure you can understand an outsider's perspective on that. It'd be cool if you could discuss some of the performance ground that illumos has covered since 2014, as Brendan gave a pretty thorough list of ground that Linux has covered. His tone always seems to be "Solaris is a sad situation, but look guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel." He gives absolutely no intimation that illumos is a viable alternative, though he will entertain FreeBSD. Always phrases it like everyone knows Solaris and its derivatives are fully dead, and he alternates between appearing relieved about it and appearing disappointed about it (I'm sure it's both). I just want to know why he rules it out so strictly. It's weird, it doesn't add up. Missing variables. I don't think this attitude is sufficiently justified by "Linux caught up, that's all". When stuff is weird, I approach it cautiously, especially since my goal with SmartOS is something simple, stable, and powerful, no fuss. Weird things are fuss.

bcantrill 9y ago

I'm definitely not trying to be "hand-wavy"; apologies if it's taken that way. So let me make this slightly blunter: our goal in SmartOS and illumos is to solve systems problems -- and yes, we do it with the courage to go our own way where we see fit. If that worldview is a match for you, that's awesome. If that's not a match for you, that's fine too -- world domination is not, in fact, our goal. Yes, we are a small community, but that's fine with us: this is all open source; it's not going away. As an aside, I personally don't understand why anyone would choose to spend their time denigrating small communities; if you want to write your software in (say) OCaml and deploy it on OpenBSD via a Nix derivative, why should anyone spend their time telling you that you are wasting yours? (These are three examples of communities that -- like SmartOS -- are small but technically interesting.) And more importantly: why should you (or anyone, really) listen to a person who has defined themselves so negatively and so rigidly? Your technology choices -- like the books you like or the movies you enjoy or the ideas you have -- are your business; don't let anyone browbeat your choices out of you simply because they don't match their own.

cookiecaper 9y ago
I see the small community in illumos as a benefit, more or less. I'm not trying to denigrate it for its size. The issue is the attrition, the apparently-negative momentum, and the loss of prominent proponents and distributors, including Brendan, OmniTI, etc. That's bad when something is already small. It makes people wonder why others are fleeing. My concern, as it relates to this thread, is around the spectacular loss of faith that Brendan has exhibited. You don't go from being a world-recognized authority on DTrace like Brendan to a Linux refugee overnight, especially not 3 years ago when you have to lay out all the plumbing for eBPF yourself. So something happened. That's clear. I want to know what it is, at least proximally / vaguely, because if it can drive Brendan away from illumos, I assume it can also drive away those of us who are less involved. If it was simply a personal dispute and had nothing to do with technical direction, that, of course, is one thing that doesn't reflect badly on illumos at all. People burn out sometimes, they want a change of scenery, whatever. But Brendan appears to stringently believe that illumos is now a bad choice in virtually all circumstances. It feels like there's something substantial at play. I don't think he's petty enough to bash the illumos kernel just because he had a spat or wanted to mix things up, especially considering it contains a not-insignificant portion of his own work. I don't necessarily expect either of you to reveal details, and obviously, I respect that you have both moral and legal obligations as it relates to confidentiality surrounding personnel matters. I'm just talking about my read on the situation, and why I'm skittish, despite what I feel are some strong positives in SmartOS's favor. A world where Bryan Cantrill is the lone SmartOS holdout, after his compatriots have declared it a lost cause, is just nerve-wracking. I'm sure you can understand an outsider's perspective on that. It'd be cool if you could discuss some of the performance ground that illumos has covered since 2014, as Brendan gave a pretty thorough list of ground that Linux has covered. His tone always seems to be "Solaris is a sad situation, but look guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel." He gives absolutely no intimation that illumos is a viable alternative, though he will entertain FreeBSD. Always phrases it like everyone knows Solaris and its derivatives are fully dead, and he alternates between appearing relieved about it and appearing disappointed about it (I'm sure it's both). I just want to know why he rules it out so strictly. It's weird, it doesn't add up. Missing variables. I don't think this attitude is sufficiently justified by "Linux caught up, that's all". When stuff is weird, I approach it cautiously, especially since my goal with SmartOS is something simple, stable, and powerful, no fuss. Weird things are fuss.