To get ROS and a few more robot related software tools and libraries as nice binary packages robotpkg might also be of interest: http://robotpkg.openrobots.org
Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process.
The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions.
The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change.
For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility.
What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly iterate on new ideas.
While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged from time to time.
Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.
Oh yes, the wikis definitly do need some love.
Documentation is beeing worked on as far as I know.
A lot more of activity is going on in irc on freenode, so if you start playing with your lab server or are just interested in general you might want to drop by in #illumos or #smartos.
- zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have.
- zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state.
Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.
Oracle has been slowly killing Solaris for some time. At the same time the community has already saved it - this is what illumos is about. It exists and is open source.
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article.
Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay.
You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones.
It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.
As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:
- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]
- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]
- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]
- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]
Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp.
Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.
Whatever reasons apple had for not using ZFS at that time wasn't some "IP shadow" as the CDDL includes a patent grant.
OpenZFS is open source and there is nothing murky or scary about it.
Linux distributions are very similar to each other. Having package management as the main thing that sets them apart.
In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.
But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull.
I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job.
As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.
From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.
The Oracle docs are not really the reference documentation for the open-source stuff, since illumos and Oracle Solaris have diverged quite a bit by now. Some things are implemented in different ways. OpenZFS in illumos has many features not in the closed oracle zfs.
The real reference docs are the man pages [1].
Depending on the illumos distribution there are more task-oriented guides for OmniOS [2], OpenIndiana [3] or the SmartOS Wiki [4].
In-depth information (driver development, MDB, DTrace) is written down in the "illumos books" [5].
These are not in danger from oracle.
Sadly a lot of good historical documentation is already gone since oracle broke all the sun.com links and not even archive.org has those. :(
Oracle Solaris might be dying, and Linux sure has a large market share, but illumos as the open source continuation of OpenSolaris is doing very well.
If you enjoyed ZFS, Zones, DTrace and so on in the past there is a good chance that you'd like OmniOS, one of the illumos distributions for classic server environments.
There are more distributions like SmartOS that tkae a more innovative approach as cloud-hypervisor that is just a slim live system.
Most of the original ZFS Developers are now working on OpenZFS in illumos.
Beeing open source also means collaborations with other OS projects like FreeBSD (bootloader and more), NetBSD (pkgsrc) is happening.