Oracle being a lock-in and lawsuit heavy company make it any solution depending on them a high-risk one. That they tried to make illegal to do a clean-slate implementation of an API means they want to lock you in even more. It's best to just avoid using any I.P. from a company like that unless the licensing terms protect you in present and future.
Feel free to get your hands tied to a company like that. Whereas, there's alternatives for rest of us that are both capable and extortion-free.
So, it was started by a devious company. They tried to kill it off. It's being maintained and extended by a small pool of talented labor. Many of its features are migrating over to BSD and Linux. They have lots more work going into them. Also less risk of copyright and patent lawsuits in the future.
All in all, it seems that it's a dead-end, Oracle project that's probably going to stay behind the others in various ways with unknown risk from its parent company. And should still be avoided.
Your biggest concern seems to be that a litigious Oracle could come after someone using an illumos-based system:
> It's best to just avoid using any I.P. from a company like that unless the licensing terms protect you in present and future.
But this is exactly what the CDDL does as a copyleft license with a patent grant. There's a good reason why Oracle hasn't gone after anyone for using illumos or OpenZFS: they can't, because these people are protected by the license the software is developed under. The most Oracle was capable of doing was changing the license under which they develop internally.
The rest of your concern seems to be about development effort and the number of contributors. While illumos-developer is not as busy the LKML, there is definitely a lot of work going into continuing development of illumos, and regular improvements.
I appreciate you actually addressing the concerns with some evidence. :) The CDDL would then knock out the patent side of the issue far as that licensed material goes. That Oracle keeps doing things like trying to copyright the API's and such might still be a risk. Not to mention it's hard to defend against a company like that whether they have a case or not. So, some residual risk there.
Good that there's significant work going into it. Although my comments don't seem this way, I'm actually a fan of multiple codebases being developed for UNIX for diversity purposes. Especially preventing one-bug-hits-all situations. I also wanted IRIX and other defunct UNIX code open-sourced for that reason. I'll give OpenSolaris bunch as doing better than anything else based on a legacy, commercial UNIX. ;)
> I appreciate you actually addressing the concerns with some evidence. :)
After all the comments and the tone, I seriously doubt that. It is common knowledge that illumos is licensed under the CDDL, and besides had you researched it instead of dinging me personally, you would have easily found that out.
Also illumos is very actively developed, and considering it has features like DTrace, ZFS, zones, and FMA, it is annything but legacy. Linux has yet to get those features, and will likely never get them. Not only that, but its mainline filesystems are from the '80's of the last century. Talk about legacy.
For someone who bills themselves as a researcher, you did not research anything I wrote about: not ZFS, not kdb, not mdb, not the FireEngine, you didn't research about isaexec, nor Crossbow, nor vmadm, nor imgadm, nor SMF, nor FMA. Not only did you not do the homework, but went off on a "Snoracle" tangent, which has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I wrote about.
The biggest irony is, for someone who claims interest in, and I quote, "systems with rigorous design and assurance argument to ensure the failures stay rare plus recoverable", you dissed an operating environment which is paranoid about data integrity and correctness of operation. illumos and SmartOS are all about being paranoid, functioning correctly in the face of failure (hence FMA and SMF), and protecting one's data (hence ZFS with meta- and data block checksums). FMA and SMF are big parts of self healing technology SmartOS is built on, the very things you claim to be interested in. In yet another twist of irony, all those features are sorely needed ingredients for massive cloud and container deployments. I for one do not want any more Linux-caused priority one incidents at 02:03 in the morning, because I actually like sleeping through my nights, thank-you-very-much!
Feel free to get your hands tied to a company like that. Whereas, there's alternatives for rest of us that are both capable and extortion-free.