Announce

It’s been quite a hectic weeks with great projects, a lot of traveling and big announcements. Here’s a rundown (a tad late, perhaps)

Debconf

I attended Debconf10, and presented on the Nexenta Core Platform. I had discussions with the Debian leaders on how the two projects can collaborate more.

• Slides
• Talk Video
• Great picture

Big thanks to Zack, the guys from kFreeBSD, and Don Armstong for insightful discussions. Also to my employer, Nexenta, who sponsored Debconf10.

Nexenta Core Platform 3

NCP v3 has been released. This release was a year in making, and the big change was the move from OpenSolaris b104 to b 134. This brings in a lot of additional ZFS goodness. Read the release announcement.

And with this we come to one of the biggest announcements in recent OpenSolaris history: the Illumos project.

Illumos

Garrett D’Amore, a Nexenta employee (and my boss), lead the formation of a fully open codebase and community around the Illumos project. This started off as a branch of the OpenSolaris codebase.

Oracle recently “closed the tap” on the ON mercurial gate. So no more continuous and flowing code. The good news is Oracle plans on making huge tarball releases along with Solaris binary releases. Read more on the full leak.

This basically forces Illumos to become a fork.

Illumos has a lot of weight behing it. I witnessed this firsthand as Garrett’s mail and phone were off the hook a couple days after the announcement. The community is large. There were around 350 people in the announcement call. The IRC headcount hovers around 200 (#OpenSolaris is around 370).

And it’s not just the community. Corporations have put their weight behind it: Nexenta, Joyent, Reliant Security, etc.

Illumos is almost fully there as a self hosting platform. With Oracle dropping the ball on the OpenSolaris community, and the OGB collapsing, Illumos has become the de-facto home of the community. Join in if you’re interested in the future of OpenSolaris.

Misc

The Golden Gate bridge

• The Illumos announcement was from the Chrysler building. A marvel in architecture.
• New York is all it’s cracked up to be.
• Ian Bagg is a decent comedian.. caught a live show at Rooster Feathers.
• Thanks to Ketan for accompanying on the bike ride around San Franciso and Sausalito.
• The Nexenta offices are nice. Working in person is.. different than working over SMTP, IRC and skype.

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