OpenCSW
| Company type | Association |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software packaging |
| Headquarters | Greifensee/ZH , Switzerland |
Area served | Solaris Operating System users |
| Products | Solaris binary packages |
The Open Community Software Project (OpenCSW) represents an open-source effort that provides Solaris binary packages for freely accessible software.
Established as an association under Swiss jurisdiction and headquartered in Greifensee/ZH, Switzerland, OpenCSW specializes in delivering software packages compatible with supported production releases of the Solaris Operating System. This project emerged as a fork created by former contributors of the discontinued "CSW" packaging initiative previously hosted by Blastwave.
OpenCSW offers support for Solaris versions 9, 10, and 11 (through Solaris 10-compatible packages) on both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and SPARC platforms. Although official support for Solaris 8 has ended, an archive of legacy packages is still accessible.
Technical details
The package repositories maintained by OpenCSW are compatible with both pkgutil and the original pkg-get tools, which facilitate automatic dependency handling and retrieval of packages from mirror servers, thereby simplifying installation procedures.
A majority of newly developed packages are created using GAR, a GNU make-based system that automates significant portions of the Solaris packaging workflow.
OpenCSW is recognized for its leadership in incorporating SVR4-style packages into Solaris. It uniquely employs SVR4 "Class Action Scripts" to unify routine pkgadd tasks and minimize security prompts encountered during software installation.
Following the discontinuation of Blastwave and the cessation of free SunFreeware downloads in 2013, OpenCSW has become the leading provider of Solaris packages. By August 2014, it maintained a collection of 3,739 distinct packages for Solaris 10.
- Blastwave — the predecessor project from which OpenCSW was derived