The open-source community has fought back and resurrected the development of OmniOS – an Oracle-free non-proprietary variant of Solaris, which had been shelved in April.

The development of OmniOS, a distribution of Illumos derived from Sun's open-source flavor of Solaris, was killed after five years of work by web applications biz OmniTI.

It was hoped OmniOS would be community-driven, simple to use, and fast to install and operate. However, the project was axed, as the project failed to make any cash out of the development and a community failed to emerge. Consequently all work stopped and support contracts were not renewed.

OmniTI had expressed the hope that "the community" would take up further development of the OS. Some 14 weeks later, the launch of Swiss association OmniOS Community Edition was announced in a blog.

OpenSolaris was the popular open-source edition of Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix, which was choked to death by Oracle after its purchase of Sun. The last OpenSolaris editions were released in 2009 and 2010, not long after Oracle's purchase.

The backers behind the new edition include Andy Fiddaman, owner of UK-based Citrus IT, and Tobias Oetiker, owner of system management company Oetiker, among others.

It intends to issue stable releases every 26 weeks and interim "weekly" updates. ®