MinkCast: Explaining OmniOS

Despite Oracle pulling out, OpenSolaris lives on as Illumos, which is a loose-knit open source community with multiple downstream projects. One of those is the new OmniOS operating system built by consulting company OmniTI.

OmniOS is described as a “JEOS” (Just Enough Operating System), the smallest possible subset of Illumos that’s able to self-host (that is, act as a build platform for itself with no external dependencies). As such it’s the perfect starting point for the sort of devops programmers building a high-integrity platform who would in the past have started from Solaris and removed code until they had their perfect platform.

OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle joined me for a discussion about OmniOS, its uses and its relationship to IllumOS.

[youtube http://youtu.be/9h817UTOxmk]

EU Procurement Failures

How do you do open procurement for ICT solutions? The answer, according to the European Commission, is to ensure that all procurement that requires tendering (and not all does) is specified in terms of the functions required rather than expressing a preference for the brands involved in the solution. But despite the clear regulations there seem to be plenty of public authorities across Europe which ignore them. This is bad news for European businesses and very bad news for open source, as I explain in ComputerWorldUK today.

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