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Welcome to OpenIndiana – A Community Distribution of Oracle OpenSolaris

OpenIndiana is a distribution of OpenSolaris, constructed by the community, for the community. Our primary goal is to be a binary and package compatible drop-in replacement for the official Oracle OpenSolaris distribution.

This project was created to address the longstanding issue that the OpenSolaris distribution is constructed entirely by Sun/Oracle, not by the community. Depending on a single commercial entity has led to several issues, notably that bug fixes and security updates are only available via a paid for support subscription, that community participation has been limited in steering the direction of the operating system, and that commercial decisions within Sun/Oracle have led to delays with the latest release.

We believe that this distribution is a necessary next step in the evolution of the OpenSolaris legacy, one that the wider community has been desperately waiting for. By engaging the community, we can deliver true transparency, deliver regular security updates and bug fixes, and bring peace of mind to our users by providing a certain future for the operating system.

Independence and Cooperation

OpenIndiana is about gaining independence and security, whilst cooperating and sharing our efforts with Oracle to benefit the greater OpenSolaris community. We intend to foster a friendly, open and active environment for developers to join us and get involved, to develop the operating system in new directions and take it to levels that were simply not possible under Sun/Oracle's stewardship.

Together with the Illumos project we will work hard in order to replace the remaining closed source binaries with open-sourced equivalents, making the OpenIndiana distribution a true open source operating system. We hope that this will speed adoption and acceptance within the open source community.

We are committed to make developing the OpenSolaris operating system easier than ever, by fully documenting the build process and enhancing it to the point that anyone can quickly and easily get involved and compile the operating system from scratch.

Lastly, we intend to enhance the OpenSolaris operating system's ease of use, such that Linux users can make the transition with as little pain as possible. Key examples of how we intend to do this include making far more free and open source software available for our distribution, as well as keeping this software up to date. We also believe OpenSolaris excels as a server platform, with enterprise features found in no other operating system, such as the ZFS filesystem, Zones, the Service Management Framework, the Fault Management system, the COMSTAR iSCSI/FCoE framework, and the Crossbow virtualised network stack. We intend to make it easier than ever to install OpenSolaris on servers, by providing additional installation options on the live CD, and enhancing the Automated Installer for automated network installs.

About Us

OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos Foundation, built by volunteers and enthusiasts from around the world. Currently build servers, hosting and bandwidth is donated by EveryCity hosting in the UK.

Getting Involved

Our success as a distribution depends upon the success of our community, which is why we would like to invite all those interested in the future of OpenSolaris to participate and get involved!

We have many resources from which you can get started, including our Wiki, Mailing Lists and IRC Channel. We have development servers available which can be booked, publicly available IPS development repositories for updating to the latest builds, and mercurial repositories for checking out the latest source code.

Further, we have a list of vacancies on our website which we are actively seeking to fill, see our website for the details.

Links

Website:
http://openindiana.org/
Wiki:
http://wiki.openindiana.org
Mailing Lists:
http://openindiana.org/mailman/
IRC Channel:
#openindiana on irc.freenode.net

License

OpenIndiana Licensing Information