OpenSolaris
Encyclopedia
OpenSolaris was an open source
computer operating system
based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems
. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the core software, and replaced the OpenSolaris distribution model with the proprietary Solaris Express.
Prior to Oracle's moving of core development 'behind closed doors', a group of former OpenSolaris developers decided to "fork
" the core software under the name OpenIndiana
. The project, a part of the Illumos
Foundation, aims to continue the development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase.
OpenSolaris is a descendant of the UNIX System V
Release 4 (SVR4) codebase developed by Sun and AT&T
in the late 1980s. It is the only version of the System V variant of UNIX available as open source. OpenSolaris is developed as a combination of several software consolidations which were open sourced subsequent to Solaris 10. It includes a variety of free software
, including popular desktop
and server
software. Sun has announced that future versions of its commercial Solaris operating system will be based on the OpenSolaris project.
On Friday, August 13, 2010, details started to emerge relating to the restructuring of the OpenSolaris project, the pending release of the new future commercial version of Solaris, Solaris 11, and how open source community interactions are being adjusted.
in 1991. Solaris is a version of UNIX System V
Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed by Sun and AT&T
to merge features from several existing Unix
systems. 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. Sun submitted the CDDL
(Common Development and Distribution License) to the OSI
, which approved it on January 14, 2005.
The first part of the Solaris code base to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace
), a tool that aids in the analysis, debugging, and tuning of applications and systems. DTrace was released under the CDDL on January 25, 2005 on the newly launched opensolaris.org website. 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.
To direct the newly-fledged project, 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 approved The OpenSolaris Charter, which 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).
Initially, Sun's Solaris Express program provided a distribution based on the OpenSolaris code in combination with software found only in Solaris releases. The first independent distribution was released on June 17, 2005, and many others have emerged since.
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
. The new distribution was planned to refresh the user experience, and would become the successor to Solaris Express as the basis for future releases of Solaris.
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
came 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.
On January 6, 2010, it was announced that Solaris Express program would be closed while an OpenSolaris binary release was scheduled to be released March 26 of 2010. The OpenSolaris 2010.03 release never appeared.
On August 13, 2010, Oracle was rumored to have discontinued the OpenSolaris binary distribution to focus on the Solaris Express binary distribution program. Source code would continue to be accepted from the community and Oracle source code would continue to be released into Open Source, but Oracle code releases would occur only after binary releases. Internal email was released by an OpenSolaris kernel developer but was unconfirmed by Oracle.
There was a post confirming the leak posted to the OpenSolaris Forums on August 13, 2010. Upstream contributions will continue through a new Oracle web site, downstream source code publishing will continue, binary distribution will continue under the old Solaris Express model, but release of source code will occur after binary cuts, and binary cuts will become less frequent.
On September 14, 2010, OpenIndiana
was formally launched at the JISC
Centre in London
. While OpenIndiana is a fork in the technical sense, it is a continuation of OpenSolaris in spirit: the project intends to deliver a System V family operating system which is binary-compatible with the Oracle products Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express. However, rather than being based around the OS/Net consolidation like OpenSolaris was, OpenIndiana will become a distribution built up around Illumos
kernel
(the first release is still based around OS/Net). The project does use the same IPS package management system as OpenSolaris.
On November 12, 2010, a final build of OpenSolaris (134b) was published by Oracle to the /release repository to serve as an upgrade path to Solaris 11 Express.
Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, a preview of Solaris 11 and the first release of the post-OpenSolaris distribution from Oracle, was released on November 15, 2010.
OpenSolaris can be installed from CD-ROM
, USB drives, or over a network with the Automated Installer. CD, USB, and network install images are made available for both types of releases.
called the Image Packaging System
(also known as pkg(5)) to add, remove, and manage installed software and to update to newer releases.
Packages for development releases of OpenSolaris are published by Oracle typically every two weeks to the /dev repository. Production releases use the /release repository which does not receive updates until the next production release. Only Sun customers with paid support contracts have access to updates for production releases.
Paid support for production releases which allows access to security updates and bug fixes is offered by Sun through the /support repository on pkg.sun.com.
(HCL) for OpenSolaris can be consulted when choosing hardware for OpenSolaris deployment.
Extensive OpenSolaris administration, usage, and development documentation is available online, including community-contributed information.
(MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative
(OSI) in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.
During Sun's announcement of Java's release under the GNU General Public License
(GPL), Jonathan Schwartz
and Rich Green
both hinted at the possibility of releasing Solaris under the GPL, with Green saying he was "certainly not" averse to relicensing under the GPL. When Schwartz pressed him (jokingly), Green said Sun would "take a very close look at it." In January 2007, eWeek
reported that anonymous sources at Sun had told them OpenSolaris would be dual-licensed under CDDL and GPLv3. Green responded in his blog the next day that the article was incorrect, saying that although Sun is giving "very serious consideration" to such a dual-licensing arrangement, it would be subject to agreement by the rest of the OpenSolaris community.
(GUUG) and took place from February 27 to March 2, 2007 at the Freie Universität Berlin
in Germany
. The 2008 OSDevCon was a joint effort of the GUUG and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) and look place June 25–27, 2008 in Prague
, Czech Republic
. The 2009 OSDevCon look place October 27–30, 2009, in Dresden
, Germany
.
In 2007, Sun Microsystems organized the first OpenSolaris Developer Summit, which was held on the weekend of October 13, 2007, at the University of California, Santa Cruz
in the United States
. The 2008 OpenSolaris Developer Summit returned to UCSC on May 2–3, 2008, and took place immediately prior to the launch of Sun's new OpenSolaris distribution on May 5, 2008, at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco, California
.
The first OpenSolaris Storage Summit was organized by Sun and held September 21, 2008, preceding the SNIA
Storage Developer Conference (SDC), in Santa Clara
, California. The second OpenSolaris Storage Summit preceded the USENIX
Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) on February 23, 2009, in San Francisco, United States.
On November 3, 2009, a Solaris/OpenSolaris Security Summit was held by Sun in the Inner Harbor
area of Baltimore
, Maryland
, preceding LISA '09.
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
computer operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the core software, and replaced the OpenSolaris distribution model with the proprietary Solaris Express.
Prior to Oracle's moving of core development 'behind closed doors', a group of former OpenSolaris developers decided to "fork
Fork (software development)
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...
" the core software under the name OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana is a Unix-like computer operating system released as free and open source software. It forked from OpenSolaris after the discontinuation of that project by Oracle and aims to continue development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase. The project operates under the umbrella of...
. The project, a part of the Illumos
Illumos
Illumos is a derivative of OS/Net , which basically is a Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities. It is dependent on OS/Net, which Illumos will follow very closely while allowing to retain changes to code which might be unacceptable to upstream...
Foundation, aims to continue the development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase.
OpenSolaris is a descendant of the UNIX System V
UNIX System V
Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4...
Release 4 (SVR4) codebase developed by Sun and AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
in the late 1980s. It is the only version of the System V variant of UNIX available as open source. OpenSolaris is developed as a combination of several software consolidations which were open sourced subsequent to Solaris 10. It includes a variety of free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
, including popular desktop
Desktop
Desktop refers to the surface of a desk.The term has been adopted as an adjective to distinguish office appliances which can be fitted on top of a desk, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor....
and server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
software. Sun has announced that future versions of its commercial Solaris operating system will be based on the OpenSolaris project.
On Friday, August 13, 2010, details started to emerge relating to the restructuring of the OpenSolaris project, the pending release of the new future commercial version of Solaris, Solaris 11, and how open source community interactions are being adjusted.
History
OpenSolaris was based on Solaris, which was originally released by SunSun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
in 1991. Solaris is a version of UNIX System V
UNIX System V
Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4...
Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed by Sun and AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
to merge features from several existing Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
systems. It was licensed by Sun from Novell
Novell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...
to replace SunOS
SunOS
SunOS is a version of the Unix operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The SunOS name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4 of 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. Sun submitted the CDDL
Common Development and Distribution License
Common Development and Distribution License is a free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License , version 1.1....
(Common Development and Distribution License) to the OSI
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software.The organization was founded in February 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, prompted by Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product...
, which approved it on January 14, 2005.
The first part of the Solaris code base to be open sourced was the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility (commonly known as DTrace
DTrace
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time...
), a tool that aids in the analysis, debugging, and tuning of applications and systems. DTrace was released under the CDDL on January 25, 2005 on the newly launched opensolaris.org website. 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
Binary file
A binary file is a computer file which may contain any type of data, encoded in binary form for computer storage and processing purposes; for example, computer document files containing formatted text...
files.
To direct the newly-fledged project, 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
Free software community
The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...
by Sun. The members were Roy Fielding
Roy Fielding
Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an authority on computer network architecture and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project....
, Al Hopper, Rich Teer, Casper Dik, and Simon Phipps
Simon Phipps (programmer)
Simon Phipps is a computer scientist and web and open source advocate.Phipps was instrumental in IBM's involvement in the Java programming language, founding IBM's Java Technology Center. He left IBM for Sun Microsystems in 2000, taking leadership of Sun's open source programme from Danese Cooper...
. On February 10, 2006 Sun approved The OpenSolaris Charter, which 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
Stephen Hahn
Stephen M. Hahn is the Chair and Henry K. Pancoast Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.As a radiation and medical oncologist, as well as an NIH-funded researcher, Hahn brings his many skills and talents to lead one of the nation’s foremost academic...
and Keith Wesolowski (developers in Sun's Solaris organization) and Ben Rockwood (a prominent OpenSolaris community member).
Initially, Sun's Solaris Express program provided a distribution based on the OpenSolaris code in combination with software found only in Solaris releases. The first independent distribution was released on June 17, 2005, and many others have emerged since.
On March 19, 2007, Sun announced that it had hired Ian Murdock
Ian Murdock
Ian Murdock is the founder of the Debian distribution and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.- Life and career :Murdock was born in Konstanz, Germany....
, founder of Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
, to head Project Indiana, an effort to produce a complete OpenSolaris distribution, with GNOME
GNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
and userland tools from GNU
GNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
, plus a network-based package management system
Package management system
In software, a package management system, also called package manager, is a collection of software tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner...
. The new distribution was planned to refresh the user experience, and would become the successor to Solaris Express as the basis for future releases of Solaris.
On May 5, 2008, OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released in a format that could be booted as a Live CD
Live CD
A live CD, live DVD, or live disc is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive...
or installed directly. It uses the GNOME
GNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
desktop environment as the primary user interface. The later OpenSolaris 2008.11 release included a GUI for ZFS
ZFS
In computing, ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes , support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management,...
' snapshotting capabilities, known as Time Slider, that provides functionality similar to Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
's Time Machine
Time Machine (Apple software)
Time Machine is a backup utility developed by Apple. It is included with Mac OS X and was introduced with the 10.5 "Leopard" release of Mac OS X. The software is designed to work with the Time Capsule as well as other internal or external drives.-Overview:...
.
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
Toshiba Tecra
Toshiba currently markets the Tecra series as performance business laptops. Although the Toshiba_Satellite series and the Satellite Pro series feature several notebook models, the Tecra series currently includes three notebook models...
and Portégé R600
Toshiba Portégé
Toshiba Portégé is a range of ultra-light laptops manufactured by Toshiba, where Portégé is the prefix name for each of the models in current series.- Overview :...
came 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.
On January 6, 2010, it was announced that Solaris Express program would be closed while an OpenSolaris binary release was scheduled to be released March 26 of 2010. The OpenSolaris 2010.03 release never appeared.
On August 13, 2010, Oracle was rumored to have discontinued the OpenSolaris binary distribution to focus on the Solaris Express binary distribution program. Source code would continue to be accepted from the community and Oracle source code would continue to be released into Open Source, but Oracle code releases would occur only after binary releases. Internal email was released by an OpenSolaris kernel developer but was unconfirmed by Oracle.
There was a post confirming the leak posted to the OpenSolaris Forums on August 13, 2010. Upstream contributions will continue through a new Oracle web site, downstream source code publishing will continue, binary distribution will continue under the old Solaris Express model, but release of source code will occur after binary cuts, and binary cuts will become less frequent.
On September 14, 2010, OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana is a Unix-like computer operating system released as free and open source software. It forked from OpenSolaris after the discontinuation of that project by Oracle and aims to continue development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase. The project operates under the umbrella of...
was formally launched at the JISC
Joint Information Systems Committee
JISC is a United Kingdom non-departmental public body whose role is to support post-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of ICT in learning, teaching, research and administration...
Centre in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. While OpenIndiana is a fork in the technical sense, it is a continuation of OpenSolaris in spirit: the project intends to deliver a System V family operating system which is binary-compatible with the Oracle products Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express. However, rather than being based around the OS/Net consolidation like OpenSolaris was, OpenIndiana will become a distribution built up around Illumos
Illumos
Illumos is a derivative of OS/Net , which basically is a Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities. It is dependent on OS/Net, which Illumos will follow very closely while allowing to retain changes to code which might be unacceptable to upstream...
kernel
Kernel (computing)
In computing, the kernel is the main component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level. The kernel's responsibilities include managing the system's resources...
(the first release is still based around OS/Net). The project does use the same IPS package management system as OpenSolaris.
On November 12, 2010, a final build of OpenSolaris (134b) was published by Oracle to the /release repository to serve as an upgrade path to Solaris 11 Express.
Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, a preview of Solaris 11 and the first release of the post-OpenSolaris distribution from Oracle, was released on November 15, 2010.
Version history
| Version | Build | Release date | End of support phase | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General Availability (GA) | Post End of Version (EOV) | SunSpectrum End of Service Life (SS-EOSL) | |||
| 2008.05 | 86 | - | |||
| 2008.11 | 101b | - | |||
| 2009.06 | 111b |
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Red | Release no longer supported |
| Green | Release still supported |
Release model
OpenSolaris is offered as both development (unstable) and production (stable) releases.- Development releases are built from the latest OpenSolaris codebase (consolidations) and include newer technologies, security updates and bug fixes, and more applications, but may not have undergone extensive testing.
- Production releases are branched from a snapshot of the development codebase (following a code freeze) and undergo a QAQuality AssuranceQuality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process...
process that includes backporting security updates and bug fixes.
OpenSolaris can be installed from CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
, USB drives, or over a network with the Automated Installer. CD, USB, and network install images are made available for both types of releases.
Repositories
OpenSolaris uses a network-aware package management systemPackage management system
In software, a package management system, also called package manager, is a collection of software tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner...
called the Image Packaging System
Image Packaging System
The Image Packaging System, also known as IPS or pkg, is a cross-platform package management system created by the OpenSolaris community in coordination with Sun Microsystems...
(also known as pkg(5)) to add, remove, and manage installed software and to update to newer releases.
Packages for development releases of OpenSolaris are published by Oracle typically every two weeks to the /dev repository. Production releases use the /release repository which does not receive updates until the next production release. Only Sun customers with paid support contracts have access to updates for production releases.
Paid support for production releases which allows access to security updates and bug fixes is offered by Sun through the /support repository on pkg.sun.com.
Documentation
A hardware compatibility listHardware Compatibility List
A hardware compatibility list is a list of computer hardware that is compatible with a particular operating system or device management software. In today's world, there is a vast amount of computer hardware in circulation, and many operating systems too...
(HCL) for OpenSolaris can be consulted when choosing hardware for OpenSolaris deployment.
Extensive OpenSolaris administration, usage, and development documentation is available online, including community-contributed information.
License
Sun has released most of the Solaris source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is based on the Mozilla Public LicenseMozilla Public License
The Mozilla Public License is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation...
(MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software.The organization was founded in February 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, prompted by Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product...
(OSI) in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.
During Sun's announcement of Java's release under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
(GPL), Jonathan Schwartz
Jonathan I. Schwartz
Jonathan Ian Schwartz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health. He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on...
and Rich Green
Richard Green (technologist)
Richard L Green was Nokia's chief technology officer and an executive vice president from 2010 until 2011.-External links:* 22 Sep 2011* * 11 May 2010.* 2 May 2006.* * 14 Nov 2008.* 5 April 2004.*...
both hinted at the possibility of releasing Solaris under the GPL, with Green saying he was "certainly not" averse to relicensing under the GPL. When Schwartz pressed him (jokingly), Green said Sun would "take a very close look at it." In January 2007, eWeek
EWeek
eWeek is a weekly computing business magazine published by Ziff Davis Enterprise.The magazine consists of a print publication and web site covering enterprise topics and is targeted at IT professionals rather than hobbyists.-Audience:The eWeek audience is actively involved in buying enterprise...
reported that anonymous sources at Sun had told them OpenSolaris would be dual-licensed under CDDL and GPLv3. Green responded in his blog the next day that the article was incorrect, saying that although Sun is giving "very serious consideration" to such a dual-licensing arrangement, it would be subject to agreement by the rest of the OpenSolaris community.
Conferences
The first annual OpenSolaris Developer Conference (abbreviated as OSDevCon) was organized by the German Unix User GroupGerman Unix User Group
The German Unix User Group is a registered association of German Unix users. The goal of the association is scientific research to promote technical development and communication of open systems which were initiated in particular by the operating system Unix. The association does not pursue...
(GUUG) and took place from February 27 to March 2, 2007 at the Freie Universität Berlin
Free University of Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin is one of the leading and most prestigious research universities in Germany and continental Europe. It distinguishes itself through its modern and international character. It is the largest of the four universities in Berlin. Research at the university is focused on the...
in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. The 2008 OSDevCon was a joint effort of the GUUG and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) and look place June 25–27, 2008 in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
. The 2009 OSDevCon look place October 27–30, 2009, in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
In 2007, Sun Microsystems organized the first OpenSolaris Developer Summit, which was held on the weekend of October 13, 2007, at the University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The 2008 OpenSolaris Developer Summit returned to UCSC on May 2–3, 2008, and took place immediately prior to the launch of Sun's new OpenSolaris distribution on May 5, 2008, at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
.
The first OpenSolaris Storage Summit was organized by Sun and held September 21, 2008, preceding the SNIA
Storage Networking Industry Association
An association of producers and consumers of storage networking products, whose goal is to further storage networking technology and applications.The Storage Networking Industry Association, or SNIA, was incorporated in December, 1997, and is a registered 501 non-profit trade association...
Storage Developer Conference (SDC), in Santa Clara
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...
, California. The second OpenSolaris Storage Summit preceded the USENIX
USENIX
-External links:* *...
Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) on February 23, 2009, in San Francisco, United States.
On November 3, 2009, a Solaris/OpenSolaris Security Summit was held by Sun in the Inner Harbor
Inner Harbor
The Inner Harbor is a historic seaport, tourist attraction, and iconic landmark of the City of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Described by the Urban Land Institute in 2009 as “the model for post-industrial waterfront redevelopment around the World.” The Inner Harbor is actually the end of the...
area of Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
, preceding LISA '09.
Ports
- PowerPCPowerPCPowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
Port: Project Polaris, experimental PowerPC port, based on the previous porting effort, Project Pulsar from Sun Labs. - OpenSolaris for System zOpenSolaris for System zOpenSolaris for System z is a distribution of the OpenSolaris computer operating system designed to run on the IBM System z line of mainframe computers. OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris technology.- History :OpenSolaris...
, for IBM mainframes: Project Sirius, developed by Sine Nomine Associates, named as an analogy to Polaris. - OpenSolaris on ARMARM architectureARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
Port - OpenSolaris on MIPSMIPS architectureMIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
Port
Derivatives
- IllumosIllumosIllumos is a derivative of OS/Net , which basically is a Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities. It is dependent on OS/Net, which Illumos will follow very closely while allowing to retain changes to code which might be unacceptable to upstream...
, a full-opensource fork of the project, started in 2010 by a community of Sun OpenSolaris engineers and the NexentaOS support - Note that OpenSolaris was not 100% opensource, some drivers and some libraries were property of other companies that Sun (now Oracle) licensed and was not able to release. - OpenIndianaOpenIndianaOpenIndiana is a Unix-like computer operating system released as free and open source software. It forked from OpenSolaris after the discontinuation of that project by Oracle and aims to continue development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase. The project operates under the umbrella of...
, a project under the Illumos umbrella aiming "... to become the defacto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required free of charge." - BelenixBeleniXBeleniX is an operating system distribution built using the OpenSolaris source base. It can be used as a Live CD as well as installed to hard disk. From the information provided on the BeleniX website, it may appear that currently, BeleniX is compiled only for 32-bit execution...
, Live CD - EON ZFS Storage, a NASNetwork-attached storageNetwork-attached storage is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous clients. NAS not only operates as a file server, but is specialized for this task either by its hardware, software, or configuration of those elements...
implementation targeted at embedded systems - Jaris OSJaris OSJaris is an operating system based on OpenSolaris with full support for the Japanese language.-External links:*...
, Live DVD and also installable. Pronounced according to the IPA but in English as Yah-Rees. This distribution has been heavily modified to fully support a version of Wine called Madoris that can install and run Windows programs at native speed. Jaris stands for "Japanese Solaris". Madoris is a combination of the Japanese word for Windows "mado" and Solaris - marTux, Live CD/DVD, first distribution for SPARC
- MilaXMilaXMilaX is an OpenSolaris Live CD distro designed to fit on a business-card sized miniCD. x86 and SPARC versions are downloadable in bootable ISO 9660 and USB disk images. The Live CD can also be used to install the operating system to a hard disk through with ZFS-boot support. MilaX can be...
, small Live CD/Live USB - napp-it, free Browser managed internet/ san/ nas/ project, based on nexenta3 or eon/opensolaris
- Nexenta OSNexenta OSNexenta OS, officially known as the Nexenta Core Platform, is a computer operating system based on OpenSolaris and Ubuntu that runs on IA-32- and x86-64-based systems. It emerged in fall 2005, after Sun Microsystems started the OpenSolaris project in June of that year. Version 1.0 was released in...
, UbuntuUbuntu (operating system)Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
userland with solaris derived kernel - NexentaStorNexentaStorNexentaStor is a proprietary derivative operating system built by the developers of the open-source Nexenta OpenSolaris-distribution that has been optimized for use virtualized server environments NAS and iSCSI and Fibre Channel applications built around the ZFS file system...
, optimized for storage workloads, based on Nexenta - SchilliXSchilliXSchilliX is a Live CD operating system distribution based on OpenSolaris. It was released on 17 June 2005, three days after the first release of OpenSolaris. Its developers claim that it is the first OpenSolaris distribution...
, Live CD - StormOS, a lightweight desktop OS based on Nexenta and XfceXfceXfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD – though recent compatibility issues have arisen with regard to BSD Unix platforms...
.
See also
- Comparison of open source operating systemsComparison of open source operating systemsThese tables compare the various free software / open source operating systems. Where not all of the non-EOL versions support a feature, the first version which support it is listed.- General information :- Supported architectures :- General :...
- Image Packaging SystemImage Packaging SystemThe Image Packaging System, also known as IPS or pkg, is a cross-platform package management system created by the OpenSolaris community in coordination with Sun Microsystems...
- OpenSolaris JeOSOpenSolaris JeOSOpenSolaris JeOS, , is a reduced installation of the Sun-managed OpenSolaris distribution available as virtual machine images for a variety of system virtualization platforms. The images are as small as 139 MB and offer an alternative means to quickly deploy OpenSolaris on a platform of your...
- IllumosIllumosIllumos is a derivative of OS/Net , which basically is a Solaris/OpenSolaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities. It is dependent on OS/Net, which Illumos will follow very closely while allowing to retain changes to code which might be unacceptable to upstream...
- OpenIndianaOpenIndianaOpenIndiana is a Unix-like computer operating system released as free and open source software. It forked from OpenSolaris after the discontinuation of that project by Oracle and aims to continue development and distribution of the OpenSolaris codebase. The project operates under the umbrella of...
External links
- OpenSolaris.com — Official Web site, hosted by Oracle CorporationOracle CorporationOracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
- OpenSolaris.org — OpenSolaris Community Web site
- OpenSolaris Newsletter
- [irc://irc.freenode.net/opensolaris #opensolaris] IRC channel on Freenode by Ian MurdockIan MurdockIan Murdock is the founder of the Debian distribution and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.- Life and career :Murdock was born in Konstanz, Germany....
- Ian Murdock's presentation by Roman Shaposhnik