Early Oxide founders came from Joyent which was an illumos shop and Cantrill is quite vocal about the history of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and illumos.
And before that, they used to run FreeBSD.
Mentioned for example in this comment by Bryan Cantrill a decade ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6254092
> […] Speaking only for us (I work for Joyent), we have deployed hundreds of thousands of zones into production over the years -- and Joyent was running with FreeBSD jails before that […]
And I’ve seen some other primary sources (people who worked at Joyent) write that online too.
And Bryan Cantrill, and several other people, came from Sun Microsystems to Joyent. Though I’ve never seen it mentioned which order that happened in; was it people from Sun that joined Joyent and then Joyent switched from FreeBSD to Illumos and creating SmartOS? Or had Joyent already switched to Illumos before the people that came from Sun joined?
I would actually really enjoy a long documentary or talk from some people that worked at Joyent about the history of the company, how they were using FreeBSD and when they switched to Illumos and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY
This is about as good as you are gone get on the topic of Joyant history.
As I recall they were also the original host of Twitter, which if I recall was Rails back in the day.
Up until 2008:
* https://web.archive.org/web/20080201142828/http://www.joyeur...