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Showing posts from October, 2013

illumos corporate entity... non-starter?

I want to give folks a status update on the illumos corporate entity. In a nutshell, the corporate entity seems to be failing to have traction.  In particular, the various corporate contributors  and downstreams for illumos have declined to step up to ensure that an illumos corporate entity has sufficient backing to make it successful. While at first blush, this seems somewhat unfortunate, I think this is not nearly quite as bad a thing as it might first seem.  In particular, the failure of a corporate entity does not correlate to the health of the ecosystem -- indeed many successful open source projects operate without an umbrella organization or entity.  Instead, we see corporate contributors and downstream distributions focusing on developing the communities behind their distributions such as SmartOS and OmniOS .  Those downstreams play an active role in improving illumos for the benefit of all, and its my sincere hope and belief that they will continue to evangelize i

Moving on (Adieu to Studio?)

I think illumos is at a key juncture, and the issue relates to our toolchain. We have gcc 4.4.4 working thanks in large part to the efforts of folks like Rich Lowe. We have historically relied on Sun Studio (now Solaris Studio) as our "base" or "default" compiler for C and C++ programs, and also to supply lint coverage. I've been thinking for a long time that its past time we (the illumos community) moved on from this.  Not only are the Studio 12 compilers not available in source form, they are now not available in suitable form for building illumos as binaries either.  (Apparently it is possible under some terms to get Solaris Studio 12.3, but who knows if those compilers are suitable for building illumos.  In the past we have always needed specifically patched compilers for Solaris.) The situation where a general developer cannot obtain the necessary tool chain for working with illumos is untenable. Today we require "lint" as part