History #

OpenSolaris: The Beginning #

OpenSolaris was born as an open-source project initiated by Sun Microsystems in 2005. It aimed to open the Solaris operating system to the broader developer community, providing access to its source code and inviting collaboration and contributions. OpenSolaris was built on top of Solaris, a robust and powerful UNIX® operating system known for its scalability, security, and advanced features like ZFS, DTrace, and Zones.

If you’re interested in the history of OpenSolaris, Jim Grisanzio has written an in-depth piece on it.

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company decided to discontinue OpenSolaris, ending its development as an open community project. This decision led to the creation of a series of forks and successor projects by developers and organizations determined to continue the OpenSolaris legacy.

illumos: A New Beginning #

On August 3, 2010, Garrett D’Amore announced the illumos project as a community-driven fork of the OpenSolaris core operating system, intended to keep the spirit of the project alive while maintaining an open and collaborative development environment. The illumos project focused on providing a fully open-source, cutting-edge operating system platform, swapping closed source bits of OpenSolaris with open implementations.

For a deeper insight into illumos and its creation, you can read its announcement and watch the YouTube talk by Bryan Cantrill, “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos” (Note: Potentially not suitable for minors).

illumos continued to develop and enhance many of the core technologies from OpenSolaris, including the ZFS file system, DTrace, and Zones, while also adding new features and improvements. illumos serves as the core for several downstream operating systems, ensuring that the innovations and capabilities of OpenSolaris continue to thrive.

Since 2010, a number of companies have built their businesses around illumos, or are running on one of the distributions built from it. For a very incomplete list, please see who is using illumos.

OmniOS: Just Enough Operating System #

OmniOS, initially developed by OmniTI in 2012, aimed to provide a modern, stable, secure and “Just Enough” server operating system based on illumos.

The OmniOS: Motivation and Design presentation (video, slides) by Theo Schlossnagle at LISA ‘12 demonstrated the features and capabilities of the initial OmniOS release.

On April 21st 2017, Robert Treat announced that OmniTI would suspend active development of OmniOS and support contracts would not be renewed. After five years of releases twice a year, OmniOS had become highly popular, yet a goal of making OmniOS community operated had not been realized.

While the announcement of this “radical” approach stunned many, Treat explained that the action was taken in part in hopes that it might catalyze the community, stating “To be clear, our goal is not to abandon OmniOS, but to divest OmniTI from the open source project in order to spur others to participate more.”

14 weeks later, OmniOS Community Edition is a reality.

Andy Fiddaman, Tobias Oetiker and Dominik Hassler have spent some quality time setting up the systems and procedures to take over maintenance and development of OmniOS.