illumos is a fully open community project to develop a reliable and scalable operating system. It began as a fork of the former OpenSolaris operating system. The illumos code base forms the foundation of distributions including a storage appliance from Nexenta, a cloud platform from Joyent, and the general-purpose OpenIndiana.

illumos is pronounced i-llu-MOS and written in lowercase. The name 'illumos' ties in with Sun and light.

The primary website for illumos is https://www.illumos.org/ . The FAQ at http://wiki.illumos.org/index.php/FAQs is very informative.