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OpenSolaris

Company type	Open-source project
Industry	Operating systems
Predecessor	Solaris
Founded	2005
Founder	Sun Microsystems
Defunct	2010
Fate	Development ceased; forked into OpenIndiana and illumos
Area served	Worldwide
Products	OpenSolaris operating system
Parent	Sun Microsystems (until 2010), Oracle Corporation (2010)

OpenSolaris () was an open-source operating system designed for SPARC and x86 architectures, created by Sun Microsystems and rooted in the Solaris platform. Its active development occurred from the mid-2000s until it ceased in 2010.

The project integrated numerous open-source elements originating with Solaris 10, encompassing a variety of freely available software, including popular server and desktop applications. It traces its lineage to the UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) codebase, a collaboration between Sun and AT&T in the late 1980s, making it the sole System V UNIX variant released under an open-source license.

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company halted OpenSolaris development to concentrate on the proprietary Solaris Express (currently known as Oracle Solaris). In response, former OpenSolaris contributors initiated a fork called OpenIndiana, backed by the illumos Foundation, which continues to maintain and evolve both the kernel and userland components. Since then, several commercial and community-driven illumos-based distributions have been actively developed.

History

OpenSolaris originated from Solaris, a UNIX-based operating system launched by Sun Microsystems in 1991. Solaris itself derives from UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), a joint effort by Sun and AT&T, licensed through Novell to succeed SunOS.

The OpenSolaris initiative commenced planning in early 2004 with a pilot group of 18 external participants that expanded to 145 within nine months. Sun submitted the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) for approval to the Open Source Initiative, which was granted in January 2005.

The Dynamic Tracing facility (DTrace) was the first Solaris component released as open source under CDDL in January 2005. Most of the Solaris system code followed suit by June 2005, although some parts remained proprietary and were distributed as pre-compiled binaries.

To manage the project, a Community Advisory Board was established in April 2005 and later restructured into an independent OpenSolaris Governing Board by February 2006. The next Solaris iteration, codenamed 'Nevada', was developed from OpenSolaris sources and served as the foundation for stable OpenSolaris releases.

Sun's Solaris Express initially offered a distribution blending OpenSolaris code with proprietary Solaris software. The first standalone OpenSolaris distribution appeared in June 2005, followed by multiple variants.

In March 2007, Sun recruited Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, to lead Project Indiana—an effort to produce a comprehensive OpenSolaris distribution featuring GNOME desktop environment, GNU userland utilities, and network-based package management. This distribution aimed to replace Solaris Express.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 debuted as a Live CD/installable system utilizing GNOME. The subsequent 2008.11 release introduced Time Slider, a graphical interface for ZFS snapshots resembling macOS Time Machine functionality.

Toward the end of 2008, Sun collaborated with Toshiba America Information Systems to ship laptops preloaded with OpenSolaris, including Tecra M10 and Portégé R600 models released in April 2009.

Support for the SPARC platform was added with OpenSolaris 2009.06. In January 2010, Sun announced plans to discontinue Solaris Express and intended to release an OpenSolaris binary version by March; however, this release never came to fruition.

By August 2010, Oracle reportedly ceased distributing OpenSolaris binaries to prioritize Solaris Express binaries instead, continuing to contribute source code but releasing it less frequently after binary releases.

In September 2010, OpenIndiana was launched as a community-led continuation of OpenSolaris development, targeting binary compatibility with Oracle Solaris 11 while basing itself on illumos and retaining the IPS package system.

Oracle issued its final OpenSolaris build in November 2010 as an upgrade path toward Solaris 11 Express. Shortly afterward, Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 was released as Oracle’s first post-OpenSolaris version.

Version history

Key: Versions no longer maintained

Version	Build	Release date	Support termination phases
			General Availability (GA)	Post End of Version (EOV)	SunSpectrum End of Service Life (SS-EOSL)
2008.05	86	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	-
2008.11	101b	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	-
2009.06	111b	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	Template:Sort	Template:Sort

Release model

OpenSolaris distributed both development (unstable) and production (stable) versions.

• Development editions incorporated the newest code, including recent technologies, security patches, bug resolutions, and extra software, but were subject to minimal testing.
• Production editions originated from a development snapshot following a code freeze and underwent thorough quality control, which included backporting security fixes and patches.

Users could install the system via CD-ROM, USB devices, or network deployment through the Automated Installer. Installation images were made available for both development and production releases.

Repositories

The software management and update process in OpenSolaris was handled by the network-capable Image Packaging System (pkg(5)).

Development builds were updated every two weeks in the /dev repository. Meanwhile, production versions sourced their packages from the /release repository, which was refreshed only when new production releases became available. Access to updates for production releases required a paid support agreement.

Sun provided commercial support for production versions through the /support repository hosted on pkg.sun.com, delivering security updates and bug fixes.

Documentation

An hardware compatibility list (HCL) for OpenSolaris serves as a guide to identify hardware that is suitable for installation and operation.

Comprehensive documentation covering OpenSolaris administration, usage, and development is accessible online, including materials contributed by the community.

License

The majority of Solaris source code was released by Sun under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved the CDDL as an open source license in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with other files that are either open source or proprietary.

When Sun announced Java’s release under the GNU General Public License (GPL), executives Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green suggested the possibility of relicensing Solaris under the GPL. Green indicated a willingness to explore this option, stating that Sun would "take a very close look at it." In early 2007, there were reports that OpenSolaris might adopt a dual license model under both CDDL and GPLv3; however, Green clarified that although dual licensing was seriously considered, it depended on community consensus.

Conferences

The inaugural OpenSolaris Developer Conference (OSDevCon) was hosted by the German Unix User Group (GUUG) from February 27 to March 2, 2007, at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. In 2008, OSDevCon was co-organized by GUUG and the Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG), taking place June 25–27 in Prague, Czech Republic. The 2009 edition occurred October 27–30 in Dresden, Germany.

Sun Microsystems held the first OpenSolaris Developer Summit on October 13, 2007, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). The following year, the summit returned to UCSC on May 2–3, just prior to Sun unveiling its new OpenSolaris distribution on May 5 during the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco, California.

The initial OpenSolaris Storage Summit took place on September 21, 2008, organized by Sun ahead of the SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in Santa Clara, California. The second Storage Summit was held on February 23, 2009, in San Francisco before the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).

On November 3, 2009, Sun conducted a Solaris/OpenSolaris Security Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, preceding the Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA).

Ports

• PowerPC Port: Known as Project Polaris, this experimental port builds upon Sun Labs’ earlier Project Pulsar.
• OpenSolaris for System z, targeting IBM mainframes: Developed by Sine Nomine Associates and named Project Sirius in reference to Polaris.
• OpenSolaris Port for ARM
• OpenSolaris Port for MIPS

Derivatives

Significant derivatives include:

• illumos, an entirely open source fork initiated in 2010 by former Sun OpenSolaris engineers alongside NexentaOS support. Since OpenSolaris contained proprietary drivers and libraries licensed by Sun (now Oracle), it was not fully open source.
• OpenIndiana, part of the illumos family, designed to serve as a default OpenSolaris distribution for production environments requiring ongoing free security updates and bug fixes.
• NexentaStor, tailored for storage-intensive tasks and based on Nexenta OS
• OSDyson: combines the illumos kernel with GNU userland and Debian packages, with ambitions to become an official Debian port.
• SmartOS: a Joyent-developed derivative focused on virtualization.

Discontinued

• Nexenta OS (support ended October 31, 2012), recognized as the initial distribution that merged the Ubuntu user environment with a kernel based on Solaris

See also

• Comparison of OpenSolaris distributions
• Comparison of open source operating systems
• Image Packaging System
• OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control
• Darwin (operating system)