Introducing Openindiana - The Free Successor For Opensolaris

OpenSolaris - Sun's project to offer an open source Solaris - was a great success

. OpenSolaris was useful to sysadmins and developers, because with access to the same source code that Solaris used, they could quickly debug issues with production systems, and work around buggy behavior.

After Oracle bought out Sun, contribution to OpenSolaris dried up. Previously helpful and concerned developers from Sun where blocked by Oracle policy from being open and sharing info with the community. Promised OpenSolaris distributions failed to be delivered, in spite of assurances from Oracle that there were on their way.

The OpenSolaris Governing Board were left with zilch to rule - no project to steer, no reactive vendor to work with. With nowhere left to turn, they resigned, and OpenSolaris as a distribution ended. OpenSolaris the project continued, with code being released and updates making their ways into the assorted source code repositories.

The final blow from Oracle came from a leaked internal memo, which laid out Oracle's future plans for the project. A return to commercial-only distributions was planned, with source code only being released a bit after each update to Solaris. OpenSolaris as a project was dead - and this impacted a big number of people who had built up business round the powerful and feature-rich OpenSolaris code base.

These events spurred the inception of two new projects from the community. First, Illumos - an entirely open implementation of the OS / Net consolidation - the kernel and core of Solaris. Secondly, OpenIndiana - a full distribution, built from the updated OpenSolaris code base. Although OpenIndiana initially uses the last release ON consolidation from Oracle, the plan is to swiftly move to the Illumos ON and have an entirely open distribution.

OpenIndiana provides a continual upgrade from the OpenSolaris 2009.06 distribution. All of the powerful OpenSolaris technologies are there, working in the same way they did before - but with just about a year's worth of updates, bug fixes, and enhancements. Enhancements to ZFS, Zones, dtrace, configuration, management - all have been built and rolled into the first OpenIndiana release.

Additionally, as OpenIndiana continues the goals of OpenSolaris - to introduce new features but remain binary compatible with the commercial Solaris operating system - existing Solaris applications that work with Solaris 10 will run with OpenIndiana.

The OpenIndiana project has been exceedingly successful in bringing a feature rich, dynamic, and usable successor to OpenSolaris. In doing hence the OpenIndiana team continues to provide a strong, open source UNIX environment for developers, start ups, and sysadmins everywhere.

by: John Calley

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