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'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. 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.^[1] Future versions of Solaris will be based on technology from the OpenSolaris project.^[2]

Contents

History

License

GPL compatibility issues

Distributions

Conferences

See also

References

External links

History

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 is not 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) [1]. 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).

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 and is a free software license according to the FSF's definition (see here).
Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary^[3].
During Sun's announcement of them releasing Java 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^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6]

GPL compatibility issues

For the release of OpenSolaris, Sun used a licence which is not fully compatible with the most commonly used free software licence, the GNU General Public Licence (the GPL). Sun's licence, the Common Development and Distribution License is a free software licence, approved by the Open Source Initiative. Due to restrictions in the GPL, a work under CDDL cannot legally use sources from a work under GPL.
The CDDL requires that all attribution notices be maintained, the GPL requires similar attributions.
However, files licensed under Sun's CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.

Distributions

★ Belenix, LiveCD [2]

★ marTux, LiveCD/DVD [3], first distribution for SPARC

★ Nexenta OS, Ubuntu-based GNU/Solaris; LiveCD, VMware image, InstallCD

★ Polaris, PowerPC port [4]

★ SchilliX, LiveCD

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 [5] is organized by the German Unix User Group (GUUG).

See also

★ Comparison of open source operating systems

References

1. What version of the Solaris OS has been open sourced?
2. What is the difference between the OpenSolaris project and the Solaris Operating System?
3. Can code licensed under the CDDL be combined with code licensed under other open source licenses?
4. Sun Opens Java
5. Sun to License OpenSolaris Under GPLv3 Peter Galli
6. All the News That's Fit to Print Rich Green

External links

★ The OpenSolaris.org website

★ How To Build OpenSolaris

★ Community Software for OpenSolaris and Solaris

★ BeleniX

★ OpenSolaris Communities

★ OpenSolaris Projects

★ OpenSolaris User Group page

★ OpenSolaris Project Metrics

★ Bookmarks tagged with OpenSolaris on del.icio.us

★ Genunix Documentation user-driven project

★ OpenSolaris Security Resources