[BlueOnyx:19941] Re: New user question about spam

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Jeff,

> Ah, didn't get that "small" impression from my poking around the website -
> the CP doesn't give that impression either, so hats off to "the two guys"
> and the rest of the volunteers :)

We did have a very solid basis to work with. The core elements of the
GUI go back to the Cobalt RaQs that were famous in the middle/late
1990's. Once the GUI got released as open source by Sun Microsystems in
2003 others took over. Most notably Hisao Shibuya, who turned it into
BlueQuartz (as well as TLAS) and released it for CentOS 4 and for the
commercial TurboLinux Appliance Server.

Eventually I took over with Brian N. Smith (who since retired) and
forked the BlueOnyx code and ported it to CentOS 5 and to CentOS 6 and 7
when they came out. So BlueOnyx has been around since 2008, but many of
the fundamental building stones (especially CCEd, CODB and the general
security concept) were so elementarily sound that we're still using them
20 years after some geniuses at Cobalt sat down and wrote the first
lines of code for them. A lot of modernization and new (free) features
went into it over the years, though.

As is the source code for the six versions of BlueOnyx makes up for
slightly over 400MB of source code and the average BlueOnyx install (OS
+ GUI) tops out at around 1200 RPMs per BlueOnyx version all things
considered.

A large part of the development process is also to keep the ISO images
for the easy install of BlueOnyx updated. As well as the BlueOnyx OS
templates for OpenVZ. For example: Getting the 5209R ISO image (BlueOnyx
on CentOS 7) to where it is now? I think that was about six weeks of
work due to the crappy mechanisms that CentOS has to provide respins. :p

Whenever a new CentOS release comes out, we'll be ready to provide a
BlueOnyx for it and a clean migration path so that you can easily
migrate from any older version to the newest one.

But it's not that we're married to CentOS lock, stock and barrel. Should
we not like which direction they take in the future, then we might also
consider porting BlueOnyx to whatever other Linux distribution that
shows the most promise.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber