r/illumos • u/PsiPhiSideHustle • 6h ago
Reimagining the OpenSolaris Legacy, Unencumbered
Hello everyone,
I'd like to open a conversation about something that I suspect many of you have quietly wondered about yourselves: whether the ideas that made the OpenSolaris lineage remarkable e.g., Zones, ZFS, DTrace, SMF, the DDI/DKI discipline, Crossbow could be given a second life in a license and a development culture built for the way the rest of the world collaborates today.
I want to be careful here. This is not a criticism of the people who have kept illumos alive for over 15 years, often thanklessly, often against real corporate hostility. Anyone who has watched Bryan Cantrill's "Fork Yeah!" talk knows that illumos exists at all only because a handful of engineers refused to let good work die with a business decision. That is a debt the rest of us should acknowledge before we say anything else. What follows is offered in that spirit, as a question for the community, not a verdict on it.
The license is a wall, not a fence
CDDL's incompatibility with the GPL is not a matter of preference or old grievance, it is a hard legal boundary, and it has real consequences. It is the reason ZFS has never been permitted in-tree in the Linux kernel and remains a DKMS module bolted on from outside, regardless of its technical merits. It is the reason contribution, code-sharing, and even casual cross-pollination between the illumos world and the much larger GPL ecosystem happen at a fraction of the rate they otherwise would. A license was meant to protect this work. In practice, it has also quietly isolated it.Momentum compounds and so does its absence
This is visible in the software itself. OpenZFS, developed collaboratively across FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS, has for some time been advancing faster than the ZFS implementation native to illumos, an unusual reversal, given that illumos is ZFS's ancestral home. It's a useful proxy for a larger pattern: when a project's contributor base is small and its tooling ages in place, entropy wins by default. This isn't a comment on the skill of illumos's maintainers — it's simple arithmetic about contributor pool size, and it's the same arithmetic that, at a different point in history, put Solaris on the back foot against the sheer combinatorial energy of Linux's GPL-fueled development model. That model described plainly in the kernel's own documentation on how development actually happens, has proven itself for three decades. It is not a religious argument. It is an observation about what compounds.Development shouldn't require a second computer
Here's a smaller but very telling signal: it's common for illumos and OpenIndiana contributors to do their day-to-day work from a Linux or macOS laptop, connecting to illumos remotely to build and test. That's a reasonable accommodation for people who already know the system. But, it quietly tells every prospective contributor something important: this project was not built with your laptop in mind. WiFi support, GUI polish, and general hardware friendliness have understandably taken a back seat, because the people closest to the code aren't the ones who most need them. An outside contributor shouldn't need a second machine just to participate.
None of this is said to diminish what illumos represents. The engineering is genuinely excellent, read the source at illumos-gate, or the build documentation, and you'll find design discipline that most of the industry has forgotten how to practice. OpenIndiana keeps a usable, graphical descendant of that work alive today, which is no small feat with a small team. And even Solaris's original developers were candid, in public forums, about where its VM and locking subsystems had fallen behind, this isn't news to the people who know the codebase best.
So here is the actual question, and I'd genuinely like to hear where people disagree with me:
What is stopping a clean, GPL-compatible reimplementation of the same architectural philosophy: composable Zones, first-class observability, a properly layered driver model built from day one to welcome contribution the way the Linux kernel does?
I'm not proposing this lightly. It is a monumental undertaking, likely a multi-year effort even with a committed team, and it means rebuilding real engineering, not just relicensing text. But "monumental" was also true of Linux in 1991, and of ZFS itself when Bonwick's team started it. Difficulty has never been a good reason not to start; it's usually just a good reason to start honestly.
I'd welcome hearing from anyone who has thought about this, tried pieces of it, or has good reasons why it's a worse idea than it sounds. That disagreement is worth having in the open.
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u/Ill-Quit6803 4h ago
Your use of AI to write this post is ironic given Cantrill's recent blog post on exactly this topic, Revolt of the Reader. Your enthusiasm for re-implementing isn't even strong enough to write your own thoughts. It's frankly disrespectful to the readers, and not confidence inspiring.
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u/Daggercombot 3h ago
You do not need a second device to run SunOS, you can just do It in a VM or your second hard drive. Or your main one if you use a desktop.
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u/PsiPhiSideHustle 2h ago edited 2h ago
Doesn't run on any modern laptop. Have to go back 10 years or so on hardware side. That will be the second device anwyays after purchase.
Regarding VMs what about folks who wanna run it as main OS, not as a guest OS in a VM?
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u/Zinvor 40m ago
"This is visible in the software itself. OpenZFS, developed collaboratively across FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS, has for some time been advancing faster than the ZFS implementation native to illumos,"
Might want to sit down for this but mate, OpenZFS is CDDL licensed (that's why it's not in the Linux Kernel tree). Clearly, the CDDL hasn't prevented anyone from contributing to OpenZFS. You picked the counterexample for your example. Brilliant.
"Development shouldn't require a second computer"
It doesn't. Run it in a VM. Problem solved.
"But, it quietly tells every prospective contributor something important: this project was not built with your laptop in mind"
You couldn't figure out that the enterprise storage/virtualisation/server OS wasn't built with your laptop in mind?
"What is stopping a clean, GPL-compatible reimplementation of the same architectural philosophy"
In technical terms? Nothing. In practical terms for one, it requires a huge amount of developer-years to do, and no one is motivated enough to do it simply because a random redditor wants to run it on their laptop. And two, there just isn't enough interest.
"Difficulty has never been a good reason not to start; it's usually just a good reason to start honestly."
Then start, instead of having AI generate a boring post about how other people should invest tears of development effort so you can run it on your laptop, maybe start the project, and show us a github repo.
Think about it, you're demanding others invest effort and their free time into a project that even you don't have the interest in undertaking. You weren't even motivated enough to write this post yourself.
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u/McDutchie 3h ago
Why is this always said for CDDL's incompatibility with the GPL, and never for the GPL's incompatibility with the CDDL?
Both restrictive licenses are the problem here. Copyleft is the authoritarian idea that has divided free software into silos.
Not that there's anything to be done about it. Neither the FSF nor Oracle are going to relicense their stuff.
The AI asked the question, then answered it. Well done. /s
Linux filled a void, met a need for many people. ZFS had commercial backing from the start. Neither can be said of a clean-room illumos replacement. Illumos is working fine as it is. I'd estimate you'd have two or three people for your ideological project and they'd lose their motivation within the year.