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What is OpenSolaris?

OpenSolaris is an open source operating system based on Sun Microsystems' Solaris. 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.

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 utilisation. 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 and Ben Rockwood.

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. Several independent distributions are also available.

On December 1, 2008, OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released, in versions that could be booted as a Live CD or installed directly. It uses the GNOME desktop environment as the primary user interface. The release includes a GUI for ZFS' snapshotting capabilities, 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.

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