# [OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

Robert Treat robert at omniti.com
Fri Apr 21 14:07:20 UTC 2017

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    Five years ago, when we first launched OmniOS, we did it out of a
    direct need to push forward the OpenSolaris ecosystem that we had
    built into the core of several parts of our business. At the time, the
    illumos community was still rather new and taking direct control of
    our path forward was a solid next step; we had already built many of
    the pieces in-house that we needed to produce a complete operating
    system distribution, and our experiences with open sourcing software
    we worked on had been generally very good.

    While we didn't know quite what the reaction would be, there were two
    things internally that guided us as long term factors in our decision.
    First, as we have done for other open source software, we thought it
    made sense to offer commercial support for OmniOS, but there was no
    desire to "pivot" OmniTI to be an operating system vendor. We like the
    world of building and running high-scale software and infrastructure
    and that's where we wanted to stay. Hand in hand with that was the
    second idea, that while we felt it was important for us to take the
    first initial steps, in the long term we really would prefer that
    OmniOS become an open source project maintained by its community
    rather than remain as the open source product of a single commercial
    entity (think Debian vs Red Hat, if that helps).

    Five years later, we are proud to see that this software has been
    accepted by a wide group of companies and end users, and we think this
    has been a boon for the illumos community, who are the shoulders we
    build upon. When you see companies from all sectors and industry, both
    small and some orders of magnitude larger, using the technology you
    put forward to build even further; well, it's great to have an impact.

    However, even with the success we have had, there is one area we have
    failed to make progress on, which is the goal of making OmniOS
    community operated. There are many factors why this hasn't happened,
    but ultimately in five years of both ups and downs within OmniTI, I am
    left to conclude that if we are ever to change the nature of OmniOS,
    we need to take a radical approach.

    Therefore, going forward, while some of our staff may continue
    contributing, OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS.
    Our next release, currently in beta, will become the final release
    from OmniTI. We are currently going through steps to remove any build
    dependencies on OmniTI or its infrastructure, and we've made some
    steps towards determining what potential resources we currently
    control which could be turned over to an open source community should
    one emerge; for example, we can continue running OmniOS mailing lists
    from OmniTI, but would eventually like to see those transitioned to
    something operated by the community itself.

    To be clear, our goal is not to abandon OmniOS, but to divest OmniTI
    from the open source project in order to spur others to participate
    more. We still run quite a bit of infrastructure on OmniOS and expect
    to continue contributing, but the current model does not work for
    OmniTI nor do we believe it is healthy for the OmniOS community as a
    whole. Could this mean the end of OmniOS? We can't guarantee it won't.
    For that matter, recent user data shows that a majority of the
    community still uses OmniOS primarily as a storage solution, not a
    platform for high-scale web computing (which was our original intent),
    so even if a community does form, it could move the project in a
    direction that doesn't align with our needs. If that happens, we feel
    comfortable knowing there are several other strong illumos based
    options available. In the end, while this rip-the-band-aid-off
    approach is not without risk, it is one we feel is necessary.

    We hope that most folks will respond to this not with fear but with
    the understanding that there is now an opportunity to build a broader,
    stronger community, and we look forward to working with others to make
    that a reality.

    Robert Treat
    CEO
    https://omniti.com

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