> If it were a community that was growing, it would be less of an issue, but everyone involved seems to be old-school Solaris geeks who just want to keep workin

> If it were a community that was growing, it would be less of an issue, but everyone involved seems to be old-school Solaris geeks who just want to keep working on what they know. This is anecdotal data vs. anecdotal data, but I'm pretty sure the Illumos community is growing, and at an appreciable pace. I hang out in several Illumos related IRC channels, and all of them have been gaining users over the past few years. I personally am a "recent" convert, inasmuch as I had limited exposure to Solaris, and did not make the jump to it (or rather Illumos-based) being a preferred distribution until the days of SmartOS and OmniOS. Many coworkers of mine that have had little or no exposure to Sun/Oracle Solaris are now converts to SmartOS/OmniOS. As far as company backing, besides Joyent, they also have Delphix, Nexenta, and Lucera. It's not like Joyent is the sole light in the darkness here. I also don't really get the feeling that it is fragmented - you have two main distributions used by the largest groups of people in SmartOS and OmniOS, but even within those and the other open source versions/proprietary appliances, there's quite a bit of coordination and work to improve illumos on the whole. I don't think anyone in the community is unaware of the fact that the whole thing is smaller, and that they need to need to work together to keep things healthy.