Today, Robert Treat, the CEO of OmniTI, sent a message to the OmniOS user discussion list entitled The Future of OmniOS. The important core of that email is in two sentences:

Therefore, going forward, while some of our staff may continue contributing, OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS. Our next release, currently in beta, will become the final release from OmniTI. [...]

As Treat's message explains, OmniTI has been basically the only major contributor and organizing force behind OmniOS, and no real outside development community has materialized around it. OmniTI is no longer interested in having things continue this way and so they are opting for what Treat adequately calls 'a radical approach'.

(There is much more to Treat's email and if you use OmniOS you should read it in full.)

For various reasons, I don't expect this attempt to materialize a community to be successful. This obviously means that OmniOS will probably wither away as a viable and usable Illumos distribution, especially if you want to more or less freeze a version and then only have important bug fixes or security fixes ported into it (which is what we want). This obviously presents a problem for us, since we use OmniOS on our current generation fileservers. I think that we'll be okay for the remaining lifetime of the current generation, but that's mostly because we're approaching the point where we should start work on the next generation (which I have somewhat optimistically put at some time in 2018 in previous entries).

(We ran our first generation of fileservers for longer than that, but it wasn't entirely a great experience so we'd like to not push things so far this time around.)

One option for our next generation of fileservers is another Illumos distribution. I have no current views here since I haven't looked at what's available since we picked OmniOS several years ago, but investigating the current Illumos landscape is clearly now a priority. However, I have some broad concerns about Illumos in general and 10G Ethernet support on Illumos in specific, because I think 10G is going to be absolutely essential in our next generation of fileservers (living without 10G in our current generation is already less than ideal). Another option is ZFS on a non-Illumos platform, either Linux or FreeBSD, which seems to be a viable option now and should likely be even more viable in 2018.

(Oracle Solaris 11 remains very much not an option for all sorts of reasons, including my complete lack of faith and trust in Oracle.)

Fortunately we probably don't have to make any sort of decision any time soon. We'll probably have at least until the end of 2017 to see how the OmniOS situation develops, watch changes in other Illumos distributions, and so on. And maybe I will be surprised by what happens with OmniOS, as I actually was with Illumos flourishing outside of Sun Oracle.

(The one thing that could accelerate our plans is some need to buy new fileserver hardware sooner than expected because we have a limited time funding source available for it. But given a choice we'd like to defer hardware selection for a relatively long time, partly because perhaps a SSD-based future can come to pass.)

Sidebar: On us (not) contributing to OmniOS development

The short version is that we don't have the budget (in money or in free staff time) to contribute to OmniOS as an official work thing and I'm not at all interested in doing it on a purely personal basis on my own time.