OpenIndiana is a free and open-source illumos distribution compatible with SPARC and x86-64 based computers.

[3] The project aims to make OpenIndiana "the de facto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are provided free of charge.

[7] Project Indiana was originally conceived by Sun Microsystems, to construct a binary distribution around the OpenSolaris source code base.

[8] Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux distribution.

[7] OpenIndiana was conceived after negotiations of a takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle were proceeding, in order to ensure continued availability and further development of an OpenSolaris-based OS, as it is widely used.

These plans came to fruition following the announcement of discontinuation of support for the OpenSolaris project by Oracle.

[9][10] The formal announcement of the OpenIndiana project was made on September 14, 2010, at the JISC Centre in London.

[11] The first release of the operating system was made available publicly at the same time, despite being untested.

[12] The announcement of OpenIndiana was met with a mainly positive response; over 350 people[13] viewed the online announcement, the ISO image was downloaded over 2000 times,[13] the Twitter account obtained over 500 followers,[14] and numerous notable IT press websites wrote about the release.

[20] The network package depot server experienced 20x as much traffic interested in their distribution than they originally planned for, resulting in more threads later being provisioned.

[21] Not all reporting was positive, though, as some online articles questioned the relevance of Solaris given the market penetration of Linux.

With the OpenSolaris binary distribution moved to SolarisExpress and the real-time feed of OpenSolaris updates discontinued, concerns abounded over what would happen to OpenIndiana if Oracle decided to stop feeding source code back into the community.

The OpenIndiana team mitigated these concerns when they announced their intention to move the source code feed to the illumos Foundation.

[25] Concerns were raised about possible discontinuation of free access to the Oracle-owned compiler being used to produce OpenIndiana.

[27][28][29][30][31] The lack of a comprehensive centralized HCL follows from the fact that the OpenSolaris HCL was hosted on Oracle server infrastructure and the server-side code for the Device Driver Utility submission was not made available.

In his resignation, Lumsden wrote, "For many of us this was the first open source project we had ever contributed to, myself included.

"[32] Since Lumsden's resignation, the project is developed by a team of volunteers and is a completely horizontal and participative community effort.

A September 2013 DistroWatch review stated that the OpenIndiana project has "seemingly been in steady decline for the last couple of years.

"[33] The same review concluded that OpenIndiana had not progressed significantly from the state of OpenSolaris five years before:[33] Running OpenIndiana today feels much the same as running OpenSolaris five years ago, the tools are mostly the same, the desktop is the same.

The software included is starting to show its age and I don't feel any truly significant features have been introduced in the past few years.

I'm sure the developers behind the project are doing a good job of hunting down bugs and keeping drivers current, and that is great.

The review concludes that:[34] While OpenIndiana appears to still be stable and functional, it also gives the impression of being stuck in the past, possibly due to a lack of developers willing to work on the project.

In the course of the first two years of its existence, the Hipster project has migrated and updated over 1500 packages: it maintains a collection of selected software packages while relying on third-party repositories like SFE[35] for add-ons.

The project has effectively moved away from Oracle-owned tools such as Sun Studio: all builds since 2013, including the active Hipster branch, use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) as sole compiler.

OpenSXCE 2013.01 SPARC Build 151a, formerly MartUX, was released through OpenIndiana on February 1, 2013, as the second and possibly last OpenIndiana SPARC build,[44] with subsequent releases based upon DilOS.

The Hipster project is a fast development branch of OpenIndiana based on a rolling-release model and a horizontal contribution scheme through the oi-userland build system[49] and the use of continuous integration.

Hipster is actively maintained: the repository receives software updates as well as security fixes, and installation images are published twice a year.