Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Sun Microsystems created Solaris, an operating system descended from UNIX System V R4 and Berkeley Software Distribution via Sun’s own SunOS. Solaris 10 eventually came to include important, revolutionary technologies such as ZFS, zones, and DTrace. In 2005, Sun began to open source the OS as OpenSolaris, while still continuing to sell and support Solaris to its customers (the company was pursuing a similar strategy with other important technologies such as Java and MySQL). The survival of Sun’s open source projects was cast into doubt when Sun was acquired by Oracle in early 2010.

On August 3, 2010, Garrett D’Amore (formerly an engineer at Sun) announced the illumos project to create a truly open source Solaris by replacing the remaining closed-source bits of OpenSolaris with open implementations. By this time, many key Solaris developers had left Oracle, or soon would, so there was plenty of talent available and actively interested in working on this new fork of Solaris. illumos today enjoys a thriving, growing community of engineers: talented newcomers as well as longstanding Sun talent.

illumos Day will gather some of these folks in San Francisco, to share what’s happening in illumos today and where we’re headed. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you can’t attend in person, the event will be live video streamed and we’ll be taking questions from wherever you are (please register!).

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