Its convoluted history looks like this:

Solaris (proprietary) -> Open Solaris -> Illumos -> Open Indiana.

Sun open sourced Solaris, then Oracle bought them and closed sourced it again. But several forks remain of the open-sourced version.

They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

> But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

Naming things is indeed one of the exactly two hard things in computer science, the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

I'll see myself out.

Three! The three hard things are naming things, cache invaliCONCURRENCYdation, and off by one errors!

Also, humour.

That's the joke.

10 print "Read it again"

20 goto 10

RUN

> They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

I think I only knew what it was cause I go on DistroWatch a bit to keep tabs on any new distros. I assume not a looot of people do this.

I am still not over the fact that Oracle ruined Sun. :( I used OpenSolaris for a long time and I liked it!

Me neither. I used to work for Sun, and knowing the culture they destroyed is tragic.

> Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris.

What's the relation?

"OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution."[0]

[0] https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#why-is-it-cal...

Looks like it's a fork of OpenSolaris[1], which is pretty cool - I didn't realize there was a Solaris variant still under active development.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

"Project Indiana" was Sun's code name for open sourcing Solaris as OpenSolaris.

There are other variants under development. Illumos probably is the largest one, SmartOS another.

Illumos is the kernel, and SmartOS and OpenIndiana are both Illumos distributions.

The OS is packaged the same way Linux is, with different distributions maintained by people outside the kernel devs.

Illumos is not just the kernel, it's a complete operating system - as is traditional in UNIX. This idea that you get a kernel from somewhere and a libc from somewhere else and a init from a third place etc. is quite unique to GNU/Linux.

I think it's not ideal to use the term "distribution" for their downstreams like SmartOS etc. because it reminds people of all these GNU/Linux distributions, but a better term doesn't immediately come to mind...

I'd just like to interject for a moment...

IIRC Project Indiana was mostly about replacing Solaris' SysV packages based packaging system with IPS, so it even originally referred to something that can be considered as "Solaris distribution".

It's especially cool because AFAIK the OpenSolaris family is the only current open-source UNIX System V distribution, and it has real AT&T code in it.

There are Multiple. I run them because it’s the fastest network ZFS device on the hardware I run that I have tested.

How do you define (use?) network zfs device? Nfs3, nfs4, iscsi, something else?

And have you tested recent Linux w/zfs?

I’ve wondered whether the name traces to Ian Murdock. He went to work for Sun, as best I recall, after Progeny closed up shop, and had roots in Indiana (where Progeny was headquartered).