`<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi all,<br><br>maybe I'm a little bit fool to ask such type of general question here...yes - I know - probably the illumos user's mailing list is the proper place to ask what I'm trying to explore here...but I feel comfortable to place my doubts here first (just see below why).<br><br>At first sight it looks definitely Off Topic in regard with OmniOS and - also - not relevant to OmniOS (and OmniTI) in itself...so first of all...really *pardon me* if I jumped in with this type of generic doubts *but*, at the same time, I hope that, among others, Dan McDonald will read and give me (and us) his opinion about what I'm going to ask...since I recently read - and here it's the point for me that legitimates the discussion here - *his* interesting presentation "2015 illumos Day" (I found it at <a href="http://kebe.com/~danmcd/illumos-day-2015.pdf" target="_blank">http://kebe.com/~danmcd/illumos-day-2015.pdf</a>).<br><br>All my interest started once I've read it and, particularly, when I started to think about the relevance of two slides: the "Non-Upstreamed Technical Changes" and "Bad Reasons for Not Upstreaming" slides captured my curiosity exactly while I was in the process of evaluate a NAS/SAN appliance intensively developed by a relatively young European company. The appliance I'm referring to, despite the company's marketing approach avoided to refer to expected terms such "illumos" or "ZFS", is clearly illumos based and uses, among other value added proprietary technologies, illumos kernel and ZFS as foundations for all other high level added features/services.<br><br>This is quite normal, nothing new here you would say (I add it's sad to see that particular type of marketing approach in use: to apparently hide the evidence of your roots not because it is evident enough but because it isn't a useful topic that help to sell...this, at least, is my perception).<br><br>The statement "Even if for a limited time, elapsed time increases upstreaming difficulty" of the second slide cited above hit my imagination: so I started to look at some illumos forked repositories (often those companies have one on GitHub, to cite only the illumos part forgetting other illumos related projects they may have forked) and the only evident fact I was able to note immediately is a probable relationship with the "This branch is n commits behind illumos:master." GitHub assertion...where the number "n" may (or may not) be an index of how much the company's project (illumos in this case) has diverged since its initial fork...leaving me with the impression that all possible related (bad/good) consequences are going to have a real (bad/good) impact on the future of the product/project especially if I want to find a relationship between those possible consequences and what is going to happen on the master branch (think about how fast things are changing when speaking about ZFS or the illumos kernel development).<br><br>Maybe that only parameter (the n commits behind) is not enough to form a valid opinion and start to speculate: "The company X develops, produces, markets, sells and supports illumos based products but, looking at how much behind their illumos fork is with respect to the illumos master branch, that is not enough...what's about their grade of contributions to the community? how good their product/support/development will then be if they tend to diverge from the community?" and so on with similar questions.<br><br>I've also read the interesting "Illumos Productivity and Bus Factor" illumetric blog entry (available at <a href="https://illumetrics.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/illumos-productivity-and-bus-factor/" target="_blank">https://illumetrics.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/illumos-productivity-and-bus-factor/</a>) but I didn't found a way to easily understand - as user - if a company is acting well in terms of commits done and why it is (or it is not) doing so...or to easily understand if its "public market image" finds a weighted counterpart in its community image (through the contributions it could give back to the entire illumos community).<br><br>This approach could be also extended/applied to institutions too, I mean not only to commercial companies seen as special or particular entities (remembering that committers are individuals that, mostly, work for companies or for institutions)...but I'm now focused about companies that sells illumos based technology because they creates profits also through the essential software components they use as foundation of their products.<br><br>Illumetrics released a framework for calculating statistics on illumos related repositories and data sources (see it here: <a href="https://github.com/nickziv/illumetrics" target="_blank">https://github.com/nickziv/illumetrics</a>) but, as they stated, it is far from complete (it seems to consider only contributions made by known names that reference to yet well known companies without considering also young/emerging ones in the count). That's not an illumetrics fault, that's clear...simply the "data cluster" is still little to infer generically about all illumos forked public projects.<br><br>So, after this long preamble, here my legitimate question: is there a way to easily evaluate how good (and in which way) a commercial company - which naturally attracts system administrators' attention with their products (once and especially because those administrators realize that those products are illumos based) - is in "giving back" (if it does) to the illumos community (or to related communities) when that exact company develops, produces, markets and sells appliances by - at best - technically/commercially hiding (or by tending to hide or tending to not sufficiently promote with the necessary transparency) the fact that their products are essentially based and developed on a illumos fork?<br><br></div>What I'm asking here are not names but metrics or, eventually, metrics' results...to help me form a partial but reasonable opinion.<br><div><div><br>Is there a way to rank/evaluate and so reward/honour (by, as example, purchasing their products or by sustaining their development as testers/free-time contributors) those {individuals, companies, institutions} that clearly demonstrate not only to have good numbers (commits) but also that they care about the community and that are more transparent than others in advertising their commercial offer's origin?<br><br>Kind regards, Davide.<br></div></div></div>
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