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.
