5 ms·

Why not state that it is a fork of OpenSolaris on the homepage? Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast).

by cies 7y ago

Why not state that it is a fork of OpenSolaris on the homepage? Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast). I think the homepage is mostly tageting techies, why not put a little more jargon in there and be transparent about the origins?

loeg 7y ago
OpenSolaris has been dead since 2009. illumos is the hard fork of that (taking control out of Oracle's hands).
- cies 7y ago
  I'd just put this on the front page. I'm not going to do anything serious with this OS before figuring this out at some point.
  - rzezeski 7y ago
    You just figured it out.
    - cies 7y ago
      It half rang a bell, the name, Illumos. Then I saw the "next gen OS" was ZFS (and DTrace was the other buzzword-thingy) which gave it away. I'm trying to help here. I think they can do better marketing when being maximum transparent from the start. As someone whom just chimed in says: they think that refering to Solaris is bad marketing. I believe the opposite. Also to get people to take you serious could be done by other means than hiding your origins. Like testemonials and contribution stats.
      - Annatar 7y ago
        There are a lot of people who never managed to learn and understand Solaris more than superficially and then didn't keep up with his quite revolutionary and violent improvement, so quite often you'll read deeply wrong and misinformed jabs about how Solaris is "Slowlaris" and so on. These have no basis in reality for almost 15 years, but illumos and his derivatives want to distance themselves from such nonsense, and one can't really blame them for that. illumos based operating systems are the most advanced on the planet bar none, and it would be a great waste to have that ruined by poorly informed superficial opinions from people with no skin in the game incorrecting each other.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    The S-word carries a lot of baggage since it ended so apocalyptically, so I don't blame them for wanting to move on.
SllX 7y ago
Matter of perspective and presentation. I think, or at least I think the thinking is that at some point a project has to move on from being a fork of their predecessor and get comfortable with having its own identity. “Illumos is a cool Unix operating system” sounds a little bit nicer than “Illumos is an operating system for OpenSolaris refugees”.
- cies 7y ago
  > at some point a project has to move on from being a fork of their predecessor Sure. But what about doing so when it has become an established name? Right now I'm only interested because it is a fork, those toy OSes that get released every week rarely tickle my interest.
  - SllX 7y ago
    Well think of it this way: Illumos has had about a decade or so to establish its name. Either it’s just a toy OS to people these days or it has a name worth recognizing, beyond and independent of the late OpenSolaris project. If the only name recognition that it has is in relation to OpenSolaris, it will never be more than an OpenSolaris fork. Personally I’m glad we can think of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD as something other than forks. For whatever similarities they retain, they also have different objectives, methodologies and identities. I hope too the Illumos project can build its own brand cachet, and I don’t see it doing that by remaining merely an OpenSolaris fork.
  - __d 7y ago
    I wonder if the name is actually a part of the problem? It's been 10 years (more or less) and to a first approximation, Illumos has got zero value as a name. Some of that might be due to its murky origins, with OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, Nexenta, SmartOS, OmniOS, etc, all having an unclear relationship and basically muddying the mindspace that Illumos sought (and seeks) to occupy. It's probably too late, but a rebranding exercise might help clarify that it's the survivor, and could also highlight the technical advances it offers, both over Solaris 10 (which is the last release most people used) and Linux (which is what it's competing with).
mamcx 7y ago
> Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast). Well the thing is that *nix is so old that anything made after 2000 is certainly "next gen".
- cies 7y ago
  Unix is not old, it is kept up to date quite well. My point was more: just say it's ZFS in stead of a buzzword-thingy that needs my click to find out ZFS is meant.
  - loeg 7y ago
    My go-to filesystems are ext4 and UFS, so from that perspective, ZFS is "next-gen" ;-). (ext4, and ext2 before it, are loosely based on UFS, whose broad design is more or less unchanged from BSD 4.2 of the early 1980s.)
jclulow 7y ago
It's been a tough needle to thread. Most everybody who has positive feelings about Solaris history already knows where we come from, and it's mentioned in the history section of our documentation site. For others, prominently featuring our Solaris heritage doesn't always result in a good first impression. It's pretty easy to hear Solaris and think "old" and "unmaintained" and so on, for whatever reason. We're trying instead to have people judge the software we ship first, rather than prejudge based on our history. The other perception we try to combat is that we're compatible with binaries for Solaris 11 -- after a decade of divergent development on both sides, we're just not.
- cies 7y ago
  > Most everybody who has positive feelings about Solaris history already knows where we come fro I was in doubt. There is an OS release every week now, I think being based on a mature one only gives me more hope. Maybe also say something about what you want to achieve (a serious alternative for Linux on the server), or name some companies that use it currently in production. > It's pretty easy to hear Solaris and think "old" and "unmaintained" This is better countered by a list of recent releases and/or recent commits. > The other perception we try to combat is that we're compatible with binaries for Solaris 11 -- after a decade of divergent development on both sides, we're just not. This is not for the front page, but good to mention at some point.
gigatexal 7y ago
ZFS released in 2005 was light years ahead of file systems at the time (it can do instant snapshots, compression, at rest encryption, protect you from bit rot, etc.) and is still inspiring filesystems today. And Solaris carries with it baggage that I don’t blame them for not highlighting.
patrec 7y ago
> Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast) And yet, ZFS still seems to be the only filesystem in the world that looks remotely appealing. Or can you name a single newer filesystem that has a reasonable subset of the features and does not actually corrupt your data (let alone run on more than one OS)? The main competitors seem BTRFS (linux only) and APFS (apple only), and the former despite being around a decade still had plenty of data corruption reports till fairly recently (and is being removed from RHEL) whilst APFS doesn't even bother to checksum your data.
- LukeShu 7y ago
  5 years ago, I would have agreed with you about BtrFS. Since 2012 or 2013, I'd been using BtrFS essentially as a cache on a build server; ephemeral data was kept there, if it was lost, it just meant that later operation would be slow. And I did see corruption, every few months I'd end up having to reformatting it. And then at some point I realized that I hadn't had to reformat it in a long time. And so when I got a new laptop in 2016 I felt comfortable formatting the whole thing (including / and /home) with BtrFS. And then I was building another server in September 2018, which would store a bunch of data (currently about 4TB), and went with BtrFS. And then a work laptop later in 2018. So using BtrFS on a variety of systems (all using close to the latest kernels the whole time), I haven't seen any data corruption since at least 2016. I'm sad that RH decided to no longer invest in it.
  - laumars 7y ago
    > I haven't seen any data corruption since at least 2016 While I appreciate reading a counterargument, that's still only 3 years and personal "anecdata" at that. So it still falls within the "fairly recently" disclaimer the GP used (3 years is fairly recent in file system terms).
    - patrec 7y ago
      And I've seen reports of significant data corruption that are much more recent than 3 years ago. Also: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg81293.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg81293.html
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Because if you hear OpenSolaris, you run the other way?
laumars 7y ago
> Why not state that it is a fork of OpenSolaris on the homepage? Why does it matter? Ubuntu doesn't say it's a fork of Debian. Suse doesn't say it's a fork of Slackware. OpenBSD doesn't say it's a fork of NetBSD and FreeBSD and NetBSD doesn't talk about 386BSD either. Also I'm pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't mention OS/2 once in any of their Windows 10 documentation let alone on their landing page. Pretty much all modern operating systems are evolutions, forks, derivatives, etc but usually they diverge enough over time to be their own distinct platform. So while their heritage is an interesting topic it doesn't actually explain anything about the OS and thus has no place on a landing page. > Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast). Because it's still a "next gen FS" and will be until it becomes common current gen with a new generation superseding it (software doesn't actually move that fast when it comes to file systems). Personally I can't see ZFS superseded for a long time to come because the way we store data has changed (eg cloud services might use object storage such as S3 instead of large NFS mounted volumes) and thus the file systems ZFS was looking to displace have once again become "good enough" for most people. I think it would take another seismic shift in how servers and infrastructure are architecture. Likely a shift away from proprietary clouds and towards open cloud computing standards -- if such a movement is even possible in a capitalist-drive world. But I digress.

by cies 7y ago

loeg 7y ago

OpenSolaris has been dead since 2009. illumos is the hard fork of that (taking control out of Oracle's hands).

cies 7y ago
I'd just put this on the front page. I'm not going to do anything serious with this OS before figuring this out at some point.
- rzezeski 7y ago
  You just figured it out.
  - cies 7y ago
    It half rang a bell, the name, Illumos. Then I saw the "next gen OS" was ZFS (and DTrace was the other buzzword-thingy) which gave it away. I'm trying to help here. I think they can do better marketing when being maximum transparent from the start. As someone whom just chimed in says: they think that refering to Solaris is bad marketing. I believe the opposite. Also to get people to take you serious could be done by other means than hiding your origins. Like testemonials and contribution stats.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      There are a lot of people who never managed to learn and understand Solaris more than superficially and then didn't keep up with his quite revolutionary and violent improvement, so quite often you'll read deeply wrong and misinformed jabs about how Solaris is "Slowlaris" and so on. These have no basis in reality for almost 15 years, but illumos and his derivatives want to distance themselves from such nonsense, and one can't really blame them for that. illumos based operating systems are the most advanced on the planet bar none, and it would be a great waste to have that ruined by poorly informed superficial opinions from people with no skin in the game incorrecting each other.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  The S-word carries a lot of baggage since it ended so apocalyptically, so I don't blame them for wanting to move on.

SllX 7y ago

Matter of perspective and presentation. I think, or at least I think the thinking is that at some point a project has to move on from being a fork of their predecessor and get comfortable with having its own identity. “Illumos is a cool Unix operating system” sounds a little bit nicer than “Illumos is an operating system for OpenSolaris refugees”.

cies 7y ago
> at some point a project has to move on from being a fork of their predecessor Sure. But what about doing so when it has become an established name? Right now I'm only interested because it is a fork, those toy OSes that get released every week rarely tickle my interest.
- SllX 7y ago
  Well think of it this way: Illumos has had about a decade or so to establish its name. Either it’s just a toy OS to people these days or it has a name worth recognizing, beyond and independent of the late OpenSolaris project. If the only name recognition that it has is in relation to OpenSolaris, it will never be more than an OpenSolaris fork. Personally I’m glad we can think of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD as something other than forks. For whatever similarities they retain, they also have different objectives, methodologies and identities. I hope too the Illumos project can build its own brand cachet, and I don’t see it doing that by remaining merely an OpenSolaris fork.
- __d 7y ago
  I wonder if the name is actually a part of the problem? It's been 10 years (more or less) and to a first approximation, Illumos has got zero value as a name. Some of that might be due to its murky origins, with OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, Nexenta, SmartOS, OmniOS, etc, all having an unclear relationship and basically muddying the mindspace that Illumos sought (and seeks) to occupy. It's probably too late, but a rebranding exercise might help clarify that it's the survivor, and could also highlight the technical advances it offers, both over Solaris 10 (which is the last release most people used) and Linux (which is what it's competing with).

mamcx 7y ago

> Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast). Well the thing is that *nix is so old that anything made after 2000 is certainly "next gen".

cies 7y ago
Unix is not old, it is kept up to date quite well. My point was more: just say it's ZFS in stead of a buzzword-thingy that needs my click to find out ZFS is meant.
- loeg 7y ago
  My go-to filesystems are ext4 and UFS, so from that perspective, ZFS is "next-gen" ;-). (ext4, and ext2 before it, are loosely based on UFS, whose broad design is more or less unchanged from BSD 4.2 of the early 1980s.)

jclulow 7y ago

It's been a tough needle to thread. Most everybody who has positive feelings about Solaris history already knows where we come from, and it's mentioned in the history section of our documentation site. For others, prominently featuring our Solaris heritage doesn't always result in a good first impression. It's pretty easy to hear Solaris and think "old" and "unmaintained" and so on, for whatever reason. We're trying instead to have people judge the software we ship first, rather than prejudge based on our history. The other perception we try to combat is that we're compatible with binaries for Solaris 11 -- after a decade of divergent development on both sides, we're just not.

cies 7y ago
> Most everybody who has positive feelings about Solaris history already knows where we come fro I was in doubt. There is an OS release every week now, I think being based on a mature one only gives me more hope. Maybe also say something about what you want to achieve (a serious alternative for Linux on the server), or name some companies that use it currently in production. > It's pretty easy to hear Solaris and think "old" and "unmaintained" This is better countered by a list of recent releases and/or recent commits. > The other perception we try to combat is that we're compatible with binaries for Solaris 11 -- after a decade of divergent development on both sides, we're just not. This is not for the front page, but good to mention at some point.

gigatexal 7y ago

ZFS released in 2005 was light years ahead of file systems at the time (it can do instant snapshots, compression, at rest encryption, protect you from bit rot, etc.) and is still inspiring filesystems today. And Solaris carries with it baggage that I don’t blame them for not highlighting.

patrec 7y ago

> Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast) And yet, ZFS still seems to be the only filesystem in the world that looks remotely appealing. Or can you name a single newer filesystem that has a reasonable subset of the features and does not actually corrupt your data (let alone run on more than one OS)? The main competitors seem BTRFS (linux only) and APFS (apple only), and the former despite being around a decade still had plenty of data corruption reports till fairly recently (and is being removed from RHEL) whilst APFS doesn't even bother to checksum your data.

LukeShu 7y ago
5 years ago, I would have agreed with you about BtrFS. Since 2012 or 2013, I'd been using BtrFS essentially as a cache on a build server; ephemeral data was kept there, if it was lost, it just meant that later operation would be slow. And I did see corruption, every few months I'd end up having to reformatting it. And then at some point I realized that I hadn't had to reformat it in a long time. And so when I got a new laptop in 2016 I felt comfortable formatting the whole thing (including / and /home) with BtrFS. And then I was building another server in September 2018, which would store a bunch of data (currently about 4TB), and went with BtrFS. And then a work laptop later in 2018. So using BtrFS on a variety of systems (all using close to the latest kernels the whole time), I haven't seen any data corruption since at least 2016. I'm sad that RH decided to no longer invest in it.
- laumars 7y ago
  > I haven't seen any data corruption since at least 2016 While I appreciate reading a counterargument, that's still only 3 years and personal "anecdata" at that. So it still falls within the "fairly recently" disclaimer the GP used (3 years is fairly recent in file system terms).
  - patrec 7y ago
    And I've seen reports of significant data corruption that are much more recent than 3 years ago. Also: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg81293.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg81293.html

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Because if you hear OpenSolaris, you run the other way?

laumars 7y ago

> Why not state that it is a fork of OpenSolaris on the homepage? Why does it matter? Ubuntu doesn't say it's a fork of Debian. Suse doesn't say it's a fork of Slackware. OpenBSD doesn't say it's a fork of NetBSD and FreeBSD and NetBSD doesn't talk about 386BSD either. Also I'm pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't mention OS/2 once in any of their Windows 10 documentation let alone on their landing page. Pretty much all modern operating systems are evolutions, forks, derivatives, etc but usually they diverge enough over time to be their own distinct platform. So while their heritage is an interesting topic it doesn't actually explain anything about the OS and thus has no place on a landing page. > Also the "next gen FS" is just ZFS, first released in 2005 (and they say software moves fast). Because it's still a "next gen FS" and will be until it becomes common current gen with a new generation superseding it (software doesn't actually move that fast when it comes to file systems). Personally I can't see ZFS superseded for a long time to come because the way we store data has changed (eg cloud services might use object storage such as S3 instead of large NFS mounted volumes) and thus the file systems ZFS was looking to displace have once again become "good enough" for most people. I think it would take another seismic shift in how servers and infrastructure are architecture. Likely a shift away from proprietary clouds and towards open cloud computing standards -- if such a movement is even possible in a capitalist-drive world. But I digress.