OpenIndiana project leader steps down

Alasdair Lumsden, the lead developer of OpenIndiana, has resigned from his position. In an email to the project's mailing list, Lumsden praised the volunteers in the project but also found scathing words for the commercial companies supporting its development. OpenIndiana is a distribution of the open source illumos project, which is based upon the source of the OpenSolaris project.

In Lumsden's opinion, Joyent, Nexenta and Delphix spent too much effort pushing their own distributions of illumos and only contributed to the core of illumos, which Lumsden says led to "the increasing irrelevance of illumos". Lumsden also points to the fact that many of the unique features of OpenIndiana are now becoming available on Linux as well. Technologies such as ZFSOnLinux, Btrfs and dtrace are not as mature as their illumos counterparts yet, but, Lumsden believes, they lead to the OS "becoming less and less important" in comparison with Linux. Taking his leave from all duties on the project, Lumsden says that he will nonetheless continue to provide hosting for OpenIndiana's infrastructure.

Garrett D'Amore, founder and technical lead of the illumos project, thanked Lumsden for his work, in a blog post. While he says that he can understand Lumsden's frustration, D'Amore has a more positive outlook on the future of illumos. He does agree that the OpenIndiana distribution is at a "dead end" in the desktop space, but emphasises other areas like cloud computing and embedded systems where illumos-based distributions continue to expand.

Meanwhile, Jörg Schilling has released SchilliX 0.8 – like OpenIndiana, SchilliX was a distribution based on the illumos core, but with version 0.8, Schilling says he has switched away from illumos because it had "decided to go into a direction of a codebase that is mostly usable only for fileservers and that is only supporting IPS packages". SchilliX is now based on SchilliX-ON, an OpenSolaris continuation project which tries to be "as POSIX and SVr5 compatible as possible". SchilliX can be downloaded as an ISO image.

(fab)