We forked this system four-and-a-half years ago, and have done a ton of work in the open; at this point, we identify ourselves much more strongly with illumos than we ever did with Solaris. We also have plenty of folks who have contributed to illumos who never worked for Sun and never contributed to Solaris; to us in the illumos community these are not "Solaris fragments" any more than they are "SVR4 fragments."

As for Oracle, trust me that I hate them as much as anyone[1], but raising Oracle with respect to illumos absolutely is FUD: the project isn't related to Oracle in any way (or any more than it is related to AT&T, which also holds copyright). Even where there are Oracle copyrights, this is open source, and the CDDL is an air-tight license that (sadly) has been battle-tested by Oracle's own lawyers. Thanks to the explicitness of the CDDL around things like patent, there really isn't much that Oracle can do. And indeed, given the massive Oracle-owned Solaris patent portfolio, the same cannot be said for other non-CDDL systems that may infringe those patents -- illumos is (perversely) the only one actually sheltered from Oracle bad behavior in that regard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=34m0s

Ok it _is_ FUD but I'm saying I can understand it.

OpenIndiana is pretty moribund lately, yeah, and there are certainly other abandoned distros. The two really "alive" Illumos distributions are SmartOS and OmniOS. Each gets regular updates, and is backed by a company that uses the distribution in-house (SmartOS is from Joyent, and OmniOS is from OmniTI). SmartOS PXE or USB-boots and is designed as a "cloud" OS substrate for starting up Zones where real work is done, and optionally works together with SmartDataCenter (also by Joyent) to orchestrate multiple machines; OmniOS is a more traditional hdd-installable server OS.

They're both perfectly usable and non-dead, although the situation of distros so strongly dependent on a single vendor each does worry me a bit (I feel more comfortable in the long-term stability of e.g. FreeBSD).

Non-dead, perhaps, but struggling, e.g.: http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/OmniOSNo10GF...

Note that the first comment there is an illumos developer offering to help -- and when Chris tweeted about this issue, he was offered similar help from the community.[1] It would be great to have a better characterization of this issue (which is not as simple as it not working, but rather is apparently a performance pathology that appears under load) -- it's entirely possible (if not likely) that this is (just) a driver bug, and not emblematic of larger issues. Certainly, taken alone it does not indicate that the OS is "struggling" (speaking for ourselves, we're 10G everywhere -- though not 10GBASE-T).

[1] https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/517404451121143809