11 Facts About OpenIndiana

OpenIndiana is the only free and open-source Unix operating system derived from OpenSolaris and based on illumos.

OpenIndiana was conceived after negotiations of a takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle were proceeding, in order to ensure continued availability and further development of an OpenSolaris-based OS, as it is widely used.

The reason for the untested release was that the OpenIndiana team set a launch date ahead of Oracle OpenWorld in order to beat the release of Solaris 11 Express.

Announcement of OpenIndiana was met with a mainly positive response; over 350 people viewed the online announcement, the ISO image was downloaded over 2000 times, the Twitter account obtained over 500 followers, and numerous notable IT press websites wrote about the release.

One article was critical of the OpenIndiana launch, citing a lack of professionalism with regard to releasing an untested build, and the project's lack of commitment to a release schedule.

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The initial OpenIndiana release was advertised as experimental and directly based on the latest OpenSolaris development build, preliminary to the OpenSolaris 2010 release.

The OpenIndiana team mitigated these concerns when they announced their intention to move the source code feed to the illumos Foundation.

Still, I feel as though OpenIndiana is treading water, not progressing in any meaningful way.

May 2015 DistroWatch review of OpenIndiana similarly concluded that little major progress had been made to the system over the years.

OpenIndiana is a fork in the technical sense but it is a continuation of OpenSolaris in spirit.

The Hipster project is a fast development branch of OpenIndiana based on a rolling-release model and a horizontal contribution scheme through the oi-userland build system and the use of continuous integration.