Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

In August 2010, illumos, a new OpenSolaris derivative, was born. While not at the time intended to be a fork, Oracle sealed the fate of illumos when it elected to close OpenSolaris: by choosing to cease its contributions, Oracle promoted illumos from a downstream repository to the open source repository of record for such revolutionary technologies as ZFS, DTrace, and Zones. This move accelerated the diaspora of kernel engineers from the former Sun Microsystems, many of whom have landed in the illumos community, where they continue to innovate. We will discuss the history of illumos but will focus on its promising future.