I don't believe these are all forks. Illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris. OpenIndiana was NOT a fork though, instead it was a distribution of first OpenSolaris and now Illumos.
I compare OpenSolaris/Illumos to the Linux kernel. You typically don't just install them just like you typically don't install Linux. Instead you install a Illumos distribution or you install a Linux distribution. Obviously this isn't a perfect comparison since Illumos contains a lot more of the user land than Linux does.
Current distributions of Illumos appear to include: OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Nexenta, and now OmniOS.
Where do you get that we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility?
One of the pressing projects appears to be to make the Sun Compiler optional. Illumos' preferred compiler to be built with is GCC 3.4.3. They do still rely on dmake and the lint from SunStudio though. Hopefully that can be resolved.
I don't know why we need Sun drivers specifically, unless we are using Sun hardware.
I think we can safely assume now that there will be NO future source releases from Oracle.
As to who this is for, I believe other comments do a good job expressing that.
I compare OpenSolaris/Illumos to the Linux kernel. You typically don't just install them just like you typically don't install Linux. Instead you install a Illumos distribution or you install a Linux distribution. Obviously this isn't a perfect comparison since Illumos contains a lot more of the user land than Linux does.
Current distributions of Illumos appear to include: OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Nexenta, and now OmniOS.
Where do you get that we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility?
One of the pressing projects appears to be to make the Sun Compiler optional. Illumos' preferred compiler to be built with is GCC 3.4.3. They do still rely on dmake and the lint from SunStudio though. Hopefully that can be resolved.
I don't know why we need Sun drivers specifically, unless we are using Sun hardware.
I think we can safely assume now that there will be NO future source releases from Oracle.
As to who this is for, I believe other comments do a good job expressing that.