snw

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.

The new OpenSolaris is called illumos.

And the CDDL is actually fine. Give it a try :)

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.

In my case illumos provided two things:

- 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.

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.