OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris is an open source operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems, now a part of Oracle Corporation. It is also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around it.

OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, with significant modifications made by Sun since it bought the rights to that code in 1994. It is the only open source System V derivative available.Open sourced components are snapshots of the latest Solaris release under development.Sun has announced that future versions of its commercial Solaris operating system will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project.

HISTORY

OpenSolaris is based on Solaris, which was originally released by Sun in 1991. Solaris is a version of SVR4 (System V Release 4) UNIX, co-developed by Sun and AT&T. It was licensed by Sun from Novell to replace SunOS.

Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A pilot program was formed in September 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants.

The first part of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace), a tracing tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system for optimum performance and utilization. DTrace was released on January 25, 2005. At that time, Sun also launched the opensolaris.org web site, and announced that the OpenSolaris code base would be released under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). The bulk of the Solaris system code was released on June 14, 2005. There remains some system code that is not open sourced, and is available only as pre-compiled binary files.

A Community Advisory Board was announced on April 4, 2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were employees appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader free software community by Sun. The members were Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps. On February 10, 2006 Sun reestablished this body as the independent OpenSolaris Governing Board.The task of creating a governance document or "constitution" for this organization was given to the OGB and three invited members: Stephen Hahn and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member).

On March 19, 2007, Sun announced that it had hired Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, to head Project Indiana, an effort to produce a complete OpenSolaris distribution, with GNOME and userland tools from GNU, plus a network-based package management system.[8] Several independent distributions are also available.

On May 5, 2008, OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released, in a format that could be booted as a Live CD or installed directly. It uses the GNOME desktop environment as the primary user interface. The later OpenSolaris 2008.11 release included a GUI for ZFS' snapshotting capabilities, known as Time Slider, that provides functionality similar to Mac OS X's Time Machine.

In December 2008 Sun Microsystems and Toshiba America Information Systems announced plans to distribute Toshiba laptops pre-installed with OpenSolaris. On April 1, 2009, the Tecra M10 and Portégé R600 come preinstalled with OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and several supplemental software packages. On June 1, 2009, OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released, with support for the SPARC platform.

VERSION HISTORY

Version Release date End of support phase General Availability (GA) Post End of Version (EOV) SunSpectrum End of Service Life (SS-EOSL) 2008.05 13 May 2008 13 November 2008 13 May 2011 - 2008.11 25 November 2008 25 May 2009 25 November 2011 - 2009.06 1 June 2009 1 December 2009 1 June 2012 1 June 2014 2010.03 March 2010 - -

Colour	Meaning
Red	Release no longer supported
Green	Release still supported
Blue	Future release