Everything about Opensolaris totally explained
| working_state = Current/Stable
| latest release version = 2008.05
| latest release date =
May 05,
2008
| kernel_type =
Monolithic kernel
| ui =
GNOME
| license =
CDDL
| supported_platforms =
SPARC,
PowerPC,
x86 (including
x86-64)
| website = http://opensolaris.com/
}}
OpenSolaris is an
open source project created by
Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around
Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. As of June 2007, more than 60,000 community members are registered on
OpenSolaris.org
with around 2,000 members being employed by Sun Microsystems. An active
OpenSolaris User Group community is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being opened on opensolaris.org.
OpenSolaris is derived from the
Unix System V Release 4 codebase, and has significant modifications made by Sun since it bought the rights to the codebase in 1994. It is the only open source System V derivative available.
Open sourced components are snapshots of the latest Solaris release under development. Future versions of Solaris 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. It was licensed by Sun from
Novell to replace
SunOS.
Planning for OpenSolaris started in early 2004. A multi-disciplinary team was formed to consider all aspects of the project: licensing, business models, governance, co-development procedures, source code analysis, source code management, tools, marketing, website application design, and community development. A pilot program was formed in September of 2004 with 18 non-Sun community members and ran for 9 months growing to 145 external participants.
The opening of the Solaris source code has been an incremental process. 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 utilisation. DTrace was released on January 25, 2005. At that time, Sun also released the first phase of the opensolaris.org web site, announced that the OpenSolaris code base would be released under the
CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), and announced the intent to form a Community Advisory Board (CAB). The opening day launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris system code was released, was
June 14,
2005. There remains some system code that isn't open sourced, and is available only as
binary files. The OpenSolaris source code represents the code in the most recent development build of Solaris.
The five CAB members were announced on
April 4,
2005: two were elected by the pilot community, two were appointed by Sun, and one was appointed from the broader
free software community by Sun. The 2005/2006 OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board members were
Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Rich Teer,
Casper Dik, and
Simon Phipps. On
February 10,
2006 Sun signed
the OpenSolaris Charter, turning the OpenSolaris community into an independent group under the leadership of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB)
(External Link). The former CAB became the first OGB, with the task of creating and confirming the governance of the OpenSolaris Community no later than June 30, 2006. The work of creating the governance document or "Constitution" is now in progress, led by a Governance Working Group comprising 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).
Project Indiana
On
March 19,
2007, Sun made the surprise announcement that it had hired
Ian Murdock, founder of
Debian, to head "Project Indiana"
(External Link). Murdock later revealed the project as "taking the lesson that
Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris," making a full OpenSolaris distribution with
GNOME and
userland tools from
GNU plus a network-based package management system
(External Link).
On
May 05,
2008 OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released. It can be booted as a
Live CD or installed directly. It uses the
GNOME desktop environment as the primary user interface. The release also includes the
ZFS file system, a filesystem with advanced snapshotting capabilities.
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 License (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 of 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.
Distributions
Conferences
Recently efforts were made to organize the first OpenSolaris conference. It's aimed at programmers or people interested in development issues and it took place February 2007 in
Berlin, Germany. The OpenSolaris Developer Conference
(External Link) is organized by the
German Unix User Group (GUUG).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Opensolaris'.
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