Nexenta and Open Solaris community have announced a cork of OpenSolaris. It's called Illumos.

Why the name cork? Unlike a fork, Illumos is not independent of OpenSolaris development. Illumos is dependent and closely follows upstream ON, but maintains some of it's own changes. So, I think it's a fork in collaboration with the original project, thus the name cork.

While Nexenta does sponsor some of the work, Illumos is independent of Nexenta. Illumos aims to be a common base for multiple community distributions. It is run by the community on a system of meritocracy.

Illumos aspires to be the community built and maintained version of Oracle's OpenSolaris code. Illumos replaces the closed binaries from the upstream code, and aims to closely follow upstream releases - allowing continued independent development.

Illumos will be based on OS/Net, a consolidation of the core operating system and networking components of OpenSolaris, with all the closed source elements replaced with open source versions.

Multiple community groups and interests have endorsed the Illumos project. Distributions such as Nexenta, BeleniX and SchilliX will use Illumos as the base for their distributions. Other community partners include Joyent, Greenviolet, BeleniX, SchilliX, berliOS, and EveryCity. Initial community leaders include Garrett D’Amore, senior Nexenta engineer and former Sun and Oracle employee, and Bryan Cantrill, Joyent vice president of engineering and co-creator of DTrace.

If you have plans to test Illumos, you can write for us.

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