[kasabali]

I'm just an outsider to the Illumos community so take this with a grain of salt, but based on what I gather from checking it time to time I don't think this is the main reason.

11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with most mindshare (SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOS. Nexenta is also a big one but I heard they don't get along well with the upstream).

Illumos is the upstream base and AFAIK Illumos community and distribution communities are indeed in tight relationship where the contributions to individual distributions find their way into the base not a long time later. And as a project it has a larger scope compared say, just the Linux kernel. It is the kernel, drivers, base libraries, core utilities etc. so developers on these different areas still belong to same tight community.

[hackbinary]

I think you nailed my point. Linux (according to Distrowatch) has 288 distros, and there are only 3 large scale commercially supported distros (for linux), so my question is in the world can illumos support more than one? What open source lets competing organisations do is collaborate on shared projects.

[snw]

Linux distributions are very similar to each other. Having package management as the main thing that sets them apart.

In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.

But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull. I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job. As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.

From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.

[kasabali]

What I'm trying to say is there is no 1to1 comparison between a Linux distribution and an Illumos one because of different structuring of upstream base and tighter community. But I don't disagree even when this considered 3 distros still may be significantly more detrimential than 1.