The illumos project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the 2013 Google Summer of Code (this marks our third year of participation in GSoC). The illumos project is a community-driven open source operating system development project derived from the former OpenSolaris project. Google's Summer of Code program promotes student involvement in open source communities by sponsoring summer internships for students to work on projects like illumos. Members of the illumos community (including Nexenta and Joyent) support this program by offering experienced staff members willing to mentor student projects.

If you might like to apply for one of these internships, or just want to learn more about our involvement in this program, please see the illumos GSoC page. OpenIndiana is also participating, under the illumos umbrella.
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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!
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Simon Phipps asks, "While some of the open source projects that Sun Microsystems created -- and which I used to work with -- have maintained a high profile, the one most associated with Sun in the minds of system administrators has been strangely forgotten ... Whatever happened to OpenSolaris?"

Oracle may have killed off the OpenSolaris project but not the community, and from that community like a phoenix, project illumos has arisen.

Simon says, "Today, multiple initiatives continue to develop the code formerly known as OpenSolaris, enhancing it and building businesses around it. The cloud hosting company Joyent has created an operating system called SmartOS as the basis for its virtualization and storage environment. Networked storage vendor Nexenta has created NexentaStor, an open source, ZFS-based storage appliance operating system at the heart of its OpenStorage vision. OmniTI, an IT services and consulting company, has created a complete operating system called OmniOS, a delivery vehicle for DTrace and ZFS for Web stack solutions."
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