The Empire Strikes Back, part 10

Or at least it feels that way. My previous post on our CIFS breakthrough would the analogous, in movie plot terms, to Star Wars, A New Hope. This week, it's the empire strikes back as we still can't use our system. This is because of a, so far, unknown idmapper problem.

Of course, the empire here is our Active Directory. The reason I say part 10 is (to continue the movie metaphor's) we seem to be stuck in a plot that mixes Groundhog Day with the first two (chronologically released) Star War's movies.

We start out as a small band of highly technically equipped rebels trying to restore the Republic by integrating all OS's into a common's of functional equality. We struggle with small set backs and then a big revelation is made to us that puts us into despair. And then it starts all over again. We never do get to a play out of the "Return of the Jedi".

The "force" of course is computer technology, very powerful and fairly mysterious. Full of young masters who can manipulate it without quite knowing why and old masters who think the why is embedded in the past events they were part of.

Ok, I have stretched this analogy about as far it can go without becoming too ridiculous. One good thing did come out of this latest round and that is we found more people documenting what they are doing with OpenSolaris, CIFS and ZFS here:
http://tinyurl.com/b3uy7o and here: http://tinyurl.com/ak8mxg .

This is promising as it shows the opensolaris ecosystem is growing. We still don't have anything like an ubuntu or Centos for it, but those took a long time to develop in the linux ecosystem. It's a matter of numbers, how many people are using this stuff and how many of them will contribute back to the community. In this regard SUN has to tread a fine line by keeping the licensing open enough to attract a fair portion of open source advocates and putting back their own developments, while still finding a way to package software up such that customers are willing to pay for it, ala RedHat.