why.html

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  14 <h1>Why Unleashed</h1>
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  16 <p>
  17 Why did we decide to fork illumos? After all, there are already many illumos
  18 distributions available to choose from. We felt we could do better than any
  19 of them by taking a more aggressive stance toward compatibility and
  20 reducing cruft from code and community interactions alike.
  21 </p>
  22 <p>
  23 The following are some of the primary features of Unleashed that address the
  24 shortcomings we perceive in illumos:
  25 <ul>
  26   <li>We are completely open source. Unlike illumos, we neither ship nor
  27   depend on closed-source binary blobs.</li>
  28   <li>We are a complete installable operating system, not an incomplete base
  29   for &ldquo;distros&rdquo;.</li>
  30   <li>We have periodic releases: roughly one every 3 months. We make a best
  31   effort to provide security patches between releases.</li>
  32   <li>We have no <kbd>uname</kbd> identity crisis: we are
  33   <samp>Unleashed</samp>.  illumos identifies as <samp>SunOS 5.11</samp>,
  34   despite being quite different from Solaris&nbsp;11.</li>
  35   <li>We are modernizing the system through removal of legacy. We are
  36   binary-incompatible with Solaris, which has allowed us to remove a
  37   <em>lot</em> of cruft. Releases may break ABIs, since everything can be
  38   recompiled.</li>
  39   <li>We are moving toward sensible defaults, instead of retaining API
  40   backward compatibility forever. On illumos, the default compilation
  41   environment is ancient, and you must specify arcane compiler flags or link
  42   with additional libraries if you want anything newer. We want
  43   <kbd>./configure</kbd> to be enough for most software.</li>
  44   <li>We have clear leadership. There is no decision-making committee; we
  45   have a BDFL instead.</li>
  46 </ul>
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