Is OpenSolaris About To Be Forked As Illumos?

There are still a few weeks left before the deadline that demands Oracle appoint a community liaison for their OpenSolaris operating system that is capable of communicating their future intentions to the OpenSolaris community (like where the hell is OpenSolaris 2010.1H) or else the OpenSolaris Governing Board will return control of the community back to Oracle. However, some OpenSolaris community developers have already had enough: they've begun work on a new project.

Details on this new project founded by OpenSolaris developers is currently scant, but the project is called Illumos and about all their web-site says is "Of The Community; By The Community; For The Community." Full details on the project are to be revealed on the third of August in New York City (with a live Internet broadcast too), but it looks like Illumos is going to be a fork of the OpenSolaris operating system.

Garrett D'Amore, an OpenSolaris and Nexenta developer, on his blog is trying to drive up interest in Illumos and the 3rd of August announcement. The Illumos domain name was also just registered by Garrett days ago. The other Illumos developers also appear to be tied to Nexenta.

Data we have found on this Illumos project describes it as "the fully open community-developed OpenSolaris consolidation" and "Community developed and maintained version of the OpenSolaris ON consolidation." The GNUSolaris.org domain, previously used by Nexenta and then for the "FreeON" project, is also now redirecting to Illumos.org.

Details will be made available on this OpenSolaris operating system on the afternoon of the 3rd of August, which we will providing coverage of following its official announcement as the OpenSolaris community operating system being led by Nexenta developers. There is already talk about Illumos going on within the Phoronix Forums.