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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

Its convoluted history looks like this:

Solaris (proprietary) -> Open Solaris -> Illumos -> Open Indiana.

Sun open sourced Solaris, then Oracle bought them and closed sourced it again. But several forks remain of the open-sourced version.

They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

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> But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

Naming things is indeed one of the exactly two hard things in computer science, the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

I'll see myself out.

Three! The three hard things are naming things, cache invaliCONCURRENCYdation, and off by one errors!

Also, humour.

That's the joke.

10 print "Read it again"

20 goto 10

RUN

> They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

I think I only knew what it was cause I go on DistroWatch a bit to keep tabs on any new distros. I assume not a looot of people do this.

I am still not over the fact that Oracle ruined Sun. :( I used OpenSolaris for a long time and I liked it!

Me neither. I used to work for Sun, and knowing the culture they destroyed is tragic.

> Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris.

What's the relation?

"OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution."[0]

[0] https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#why-is-it-cal...

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