Posts tagged "illumos"

More than a while ago, I wrote about the birth of Illumos, a project that aims at substituting the last non-open-source bits from the OpenSolaris kernel with replacements, in order to create a 100% open source Solaris kernel.

On May 20th, I had the opportunity to attend the Nexenta European User Conference 2011 (no link, page no longer exists) in Amsterdam, where Solaris and storage enthusiasts from all over the world met to discuss their favorite technology: ZFS. Of course there was also a lot of talk about Illumos and related projects.

Now I’ve given a lot of Solaris presentations to customers, always highlighting the big, growing and powerful community behind the Solaris OS. But this conference added a new dimension to the Solaris Eco-System for me!

Ever since Oracle announced that they’ll buy Sun (no link, page no longer exists), there has been a lot of discussion about the future (some would say “fate”) of OpenSolaris in the “community”.

In fact, the last 15 months have been very instructive in terms of how communities work, or how they don’t.

Let’s check out what a community is supposed to do, and what it is not supposed to do, in the light of the latest OpenSolaris announcement: Illumos.