OpenIndiana is a free and open-source illumos distribution descended from UNIX System V Release 4 via the OpenSolaris operating system. Forked from OpenSolaris after OpenSolaris was discontinued by Oracle Corporation, OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010.
Created by a development team led by Alasdair Lumsden, the OpenIndiana project is now stewarded by the illumos Foundation, which develops and maintains the illumos operating system. The project aims to make OpenIndiana "the de facto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are provided free of charge."
History
Origins
Project Indiana was originally conceived by Sun Microsystems, to construct a binary distribution around the OpenSolaris source code base. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux distribution.
OpenIndiana was conceived after negotiations of a takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle were proceeding, in order to ensure continued availability and further development of an OpenSolaris-based OS, as it is widely used. Uncertainty among the OpenSolaris development community led some developers to form tentative plans for a fork of the existing codebase.
These plans came to fruition following the announcement of discontinuation of support for the OpenSolaris project by Oracle.
Initial reaction
The formal announcement of the OpenIndiana project was made on September 14, 2010, at the JISC Centre in London. The first release of the operating system was made available publicly at the same time, despite being untested. The reason for the untested release was that the OpenIndiana team set a launch date ahead of Oracle OpenWorld in order to beat the release of Solaris 11 Express.
The announcement of OpenIndiana was met with a mainly positive response; over 350 people viewed the online announcement, the ISO image was downloaded over 2000 times, the Twitter account obtained over 500 followers, and numerous notable IT press websites wrote about the release. The broadcast bandwidth of the announcement was substantial, noted to top 350Mbit/second. The network package depot server experienced 20x as much traffic interested in their distribution than they originally planned for, resulting in more threads later being provisioned.
Not all reporting was positive, though, as some online articles questioned the relevance of Solaris given the market penetration of Linux. One article was critical of the OpenIndiana launch, citing a lack of professionalism with regard to releasing an untested build, and the project's lack of commitment to a release schedule. The initial OpenIndiana release was advertised as experimental and directly based on the latest OpenSolaris development build, preliminary to the OpenSolaris 2010 release.
Community building
With the OpenSolaris binary distribution moved to SolarisExpress and the real-time feed of OpenSolaris updates discontinued, concerns abounded over what would happen to OpenIndiana if Oracle decided to stop feeding source code back into the community. The OpenIndiana team mitigated these concerns when they announced their intention to move the source code feed to the illumos Foundation.
Concerns were raised about possible discontinuation of free access to the Oracle-owned compiler being used to produce OpenIndiana. In response, OpenIndiana was modified to be able to compile under the open source GNU Compiler Collection.
The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) remains somewhat informal, fragmented and uncentralized, requiring much end-user research for hardware selection. The lack of a comprehensive centralized HCL follows from the fact that the OpenSolaris HCL was hosted on Oracle server infrastructure and the server-side code for the Device Driver Utility submission was not made available.
In August 2012, founding project lead Alasdair Lumsden stepped down from the project, citing personal reasons and frustration with the lack of progress made on the project. Among the reasons for lack of progress were lack of developers and resources. In his resignation, Lumsden wrote, "For many of us this was the first open source project we had ever contributed to, myself included. The task at hand was vast, and we were ill equipped to deal with it."
Since Lumsden's resignation, the project is developed by a team of volunteers and is a completely horizontal and participative community effort.