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Old 26th March 2012
gpatrick gpatrick is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 245
Default OpenIndiana is it dead or alive?

For 17 years I've used AIX and for 10 years I've used Solaris in Enterprise environments. When SUN Microsystems developed OpenSolaris I installed the first release and enjoyed some of the new features such as their boot environment using beadm and network virtualization (Crossbow). I wasn't too enthusiastic about the online installation required to install Zones since there were a few times the repository was down. All in all it was a good experience and I updated with each new release.

The writing on the wall was apparent after the Oracle purchase that OpenSolaris was going to meet its demise, which it ultimately did. Later the illumos project began which was going to take over from SUN's ON development, and OpenIndiana became the fork of OpenSolaris.

OpenIndiana has had a development release since Sep 2011 and their website and wiki state a stable release would be made by end-of-year 2011. Four months later there isn't any sign there is an imminent stable release. Pages on the wiki have had comments unanswered for months. pfexec which worked for me flawlessly on OpenSolaris doesn't work in OpenIndiana and I am forced to su to root. Some of the bugs from the development release have never been fixed even if there has been some development.

I've heard claims there aren't many developers but that doesn't seem to carry much weight since OpenBSD doesn't have hundreds of developers and it has 2 stable releases per year with many changes and even a rewrite of pf and the inclusion of a new MTA (the wonderful OpenSMTPD). The web page for OpenIndiana states it was accepted into the Google Summer of Code, but I don't know what the purpose is since the project really seems dead.

Does anyone know if OpenIndiana actually has any life? Does anyone use it?
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