I think the homepage is mostly tageting techies, why not put a little more jargon in there and be transparent about the origins?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
And Solaris carries with it baggage that I don’t blame them for not highlighting.
“Illumos is a cool Unix operating system” sounds a little bit nicer than “Illumos is an operating system for OpenSolaris refugees”.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Well the thing is that *nix is so old that anything made after 2000 is certainly "next gen".
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.