It’s not exactly a fork. But it is a new community-driven effort to develop open source versions of many widely used OpenSolaris technologies, including the ZFS filesystem and the libc library.
Illumos comes in response to widespread uncertainty throughout the OpenSolaris community about Oracle’s plans for the operating system since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. So far Oracle is not on board with the project, and the Illumos developers anticipate that there will be some friction as the two versions of OpenSolaris evolve, but they are not committed to forking the project. Server Watch takes a look.
With Oracle having remained relatively quiet about its plans for OpenSolaris since it acquired the operating system — along with the rest of Sun Microsystems — concern has been growing among members of the OpenSolaris community about the project’s future.
Those concerns have now led to community action in the form of the new Illumos project, founded to provide an alternative for those that want to use OpenSolaris technologies, including the ZFS filesystem.
