After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and killed OpenSolaris, former Sun engineers and the community rallied to create OpenIndiana as a continuation built on the illumos kernel fork.
OpenIndiana is a Unix operating system derived from OpenSolaris/illumos, featuring ZFS filesystem, DTrace dynamic tracing, Zones containerization, Crossbow network virtualization, and SMF service management. It uses the IPS package management system and supports both server and desktop use cases.
OpenSolaris was Sun Microsystems' gift to the open-source world — a fully open version of Solaris, the Unix operating system that had powered enterprise computing since the 1980s. It included ZFS, DTrace, and other technologies that were years ahead of what Linux offered. Then Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the gift was promptly returned to sender.
Oracle's playbook was predictable: discontinue the open-source community edition, pivot to the proprietary Solaris Express (later Oracle Solaris), and pretend the community never existed. On August 13, 2010, the writing appeared on the wall when internal Oracle communications leaked confirming OpenSolaris was cancelled.
Alasdair Lumsden, who ran a hosting company in London and had been using Solaris since 2008, organized a weekend hackathon through the London OpenSolaris Users Group to explore forking options. He connected with Garrett D'Amore, a former Sun kernel programmer who had already started the illumos project to fork and open-source the remaining proprietary bits of the Solaris kernel.
On September 14, 2010, OpenIndiana was formally announced at the JISC Centre in London, with the first release made available the same day — despite being essentially untested. The project was built on top of illumos, providing a complete desktop and server operating system that continued where OpenSolaris left off.
But the story has its disappointments. Lumsden resigned as project lead in August 2012, citing personal reasons and frustration with the lack of progress. The illumos ecosystem fractured into multiple distributions (SmartOS, OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Tribblix), none of which achieved critical mass. ZFS and DTrace eventually made their way to Linux, removing two of illumos's biggest competitive advantages.
OpenIndiana persists as a niche distribution for those who value the Solaris heritage, releasing the 'Hipster' edition with rolling updates. It's a noble effort at preservation, even if the world largely moved on.
Oracle completes acquisition of Sun Microsystems
illumos announced as community fork of the OpenSolaris kernel
Oracle effectively cancels OpenSolaris, pivoting to proprietary Solaris
OpenIndiana formally launched at JISC Centre in London
Founding project lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns
OpenIndiana preserved access to the Solaris ecosystem for users and developers who refused to migrate to Oracle's proprietary version or switch to Linux. Together with illumos, it kept technologies like ZFS, DTrace, Crossbow networking, and Zones virtualization available under open-source licenses.
The broader illumos ecosystem influenced Linux significantly — ZFS on Linux (now OpenZFS) and the DTrace port to Linux both trace their lineage to the open-source Solaris codebase that OpenIndiana helped preserve. Even if OpenIndiana itself never achieved mainstream adoption, its contribution to keeping the Solaris codebase alive had downstream effects across the industry.