It's not a blog post, it's an RFD. We have a strong focus on writing as part of thinking and making decisions, and when we can, we like to publish our decision making documents in the spirit of open source. This is not a defence of our position so much as a record of the process through which we arrived at it. This is true of our other RFDs as well, which you can see on the site there.
> It also should not matter to their customers. They get exposed APIs and don't have to care about the implementation details.
Yes, the whole product is definitely designed that way intentionally. Customers get abstracted control of compute and storage resources through cloud style APIs. From their perspective it's a cloud appliance. It's only from our perspective as the people building it that it's a UNIX system.
So at no point did anyone even suspect that Illumos was under consideration because it's been corporate leadership's pet project for decades? That seems like a wild thing to omit from the "RFD" process. Or were some topics not open to the "RFD" process?
We are trying to build a business here. The goal is to sell racks and racks of computers to people, not build a menagerie of curiosities and fund personal projects. Everything we've written here is real, at least from our point of view. If we didn't think it would work, why would we throw our own business, and equity, and so on, away?
The reason I continue to invest myself, if nothing else, in illumos, is because I genuinely believe it represents a better aggregate trade off for production work than the available alternatives. This document is an attempt to distill why that is, not an attempt to cover up a personal preference. I do have a personal preference, and I'm not shy about it -- but that preference is based on tangible experiences over twenty years!
Furthermore, your team have already demonstrated that you can reevaluate things that you had strong opinions on, and come to a different conclusion. I'm thinking of the decision to exclusively run hardware-virtualized VMs rather than LX-branded zones, as we discussed on Oxide and Friends before.
I don't think working at Oxide would be for me, but I respect the team's values and process.
Frankly I don't understand why they blogged that at all. It reeks of desperation, like they feel they need to defend their choice. They don't.
It also should not matter to their customers. They get exposed APIs and don't have to care about the implementation details.