While
Oracle killed off OpenSolaris and
the OpenSolaris Governing Board dissolved itself, the community of OpenSolaris developers have not given up but instead have begun working on their own community OpenSolaris-based operating systems to provide the world with choices beyond the upcoming Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Express 11. There is already the
Illumos Project, which is
a fork of OpenSolaris with a fully open-source code-base, that is now being used within the
Nexenta and
SchilliX operating systems, among others. We have just been tipped off as well that next week another new OpenSolaris derivative is being announced and it's to be called OpenIndiana.
It was
Project Indiana years ago when Debian's Ian Murdock joined Sun Microsystems to create the OpenSolaris binary distribution and all of that hooha leading up to
the first OpenSolaris Indiana release. OpenIndiana is a new OpenSolaris distribution and fortunately they will be collaborating with -- and using -- Illumos for its OpenSolaris base.
The full announcement of OpenIndiana will not be made until next week Tuesday, the 14th of September. The OpenIndiana announcement is being made at the JISC office in London. Announcement details will be available on
this page.
Soon as we know more details concerning OpenIndiana we will be sure to pass them along. At least the OpenSolaris development community is continuing to thrive without Oracle.