There's that. But IllumOS is still around and has various derivatives that are under active development.

Last time I heard anything about Oracle Solaris, they fired more than a thousands developers at once, and some people commented that Solaris development at Oracle was more or less dead. (I have no clue if that is true, however.)

> But IllumOS is still around and has various derivatives that are under active development.

It's still an unfortunate blow. A lot of open-source projects are only as popular and widespread because of companies that effectively champion them in a way that convinces other people or companies to jump on the bandwagon. IllumOS, by way of being the pet project of some fairly unknown software company, is hiding in obscurity at this point when it could have been a serious contender as Solaris.

> pet project of some fairly unknown software company

IIRC, illumos is a loose community full of former Solaris devs, there's no one company behind the illumos kernel.

Joyent, the company behind the SmartOS distribution, I'd say is far from "unknown" — they started that whole node.js thing after all!

It is sad, yes, considering what OpenSolaris could have become. But at least Oracle was not able to completely destroy the community that had grown around it.

This probably sounds silly, but I find it sad, personally, because Solaris is probably the second coolest name ever given to an operating system, after Siemens' BS2000.

Illumos is where it's at now.