Jörg Schilling — the controversial author of cdrtools who was simultaneously one of the most respected and most contentious figures in open-source Unix development — built SchilliX as the very first distribution based on OpenSolaris. Released on June 17, 2005, just three days after Sun launched the OpenSolaris project, SchilliX was a live CD distribution that replaced closed-source components with open-source alternatives.

Schilling was a Fraunhofer Institute researcher and Sun/Oracle collaborator with deep knowledge of the Solaris internals. SchilliX served as both a demonstration of OpenSolaris's potential and a personal project reflecting Schilling's vision of what an open-source Solaris should look like.

The project evolved through multiple releases, with Schilling and a small team (Fabian Otto, Thomas Blaesing, Tobias Kirschstein) maintaining it. After Oracle killed OpenSolaris in 2010, SchilliX shifted to use illumos as its base, even creating a sub-project called SchilliX-ON as its own OpenSolaris kernel fork.

But the transition strained the project's limited resources. The last release was version 0.8 in August 2012, after which development went silent. As a primarily one-person project (like much of Schilling's work), SchilliX reflected the bus-factor risk that haunted all of Schilling's contributions.

When Schilling died of kidney cancer on October 10, 2021, SchilliX was already long dormant. But his death underscored a broader problem: Schilling maintained an entire ecosystem of Unix tools (cdrtools, star, smake, and more) that were all bus-factor-one projects. While volunteers later took over cdrtools maintenance via Codeberg, SchilliX was too niche to attract successors.

SchilliX was historically significant as the first OpenSolaris distribution, demonstrating that the platform could work as a standalone OS. But its one-developer model made it unsustainable. Schilling's death orphaned not just SchilliX but an entire ecosystem of Unix tools he maintained.