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OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System technology. The project is aimed at developers, system administrators, and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. Over 12,000 community members are registered on [http://www.opensolaris.org/ OpenSolaris.org], of whom over 11,000 are not Sun employees. An active [http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/ OpenSolaris User Group community] is now growing worldwide, and dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects are being formed on opensolaris.org.
OpenSolaris is derived from the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, though much of it has been modified since originally licensed by Sun for technical reasons. It is the only open source System V derivative available.
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 [http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/charter/ the OpenSolaris Charter], turning the OpenSolaris community into an independent group under the leadership of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) [http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=opensolaris_independence_day]. 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 [http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses here -->.
During Sun's announcement of them releasing Java under the GPL [http://mediacast.sun.com/share/tmarble/Sun_Opens_Java.ogg], Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green both hinted at the possibility of releasing Solaris under the GPL.
Criticism
Many Free Software/Open Source communities believe the OpenSolaris community to be more a Sun controlled corporate project than a true open source community process and do not see it as a free operating system in the tradition of free software. In order to administer the project, Sun formed a Community Advisory Board of elected members and created governance policies that some feel are more in keeping with the closed cathedral model of software development than the open bazaar model.
The Free Software Foundation's Free Software license list states that the licensing used by Sun for open-sourcing its Solaris 10 operating system is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html], though it does maintain that the CDDL is a legitmate free software license nevertheless. The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) requires that all attribution notices be maintained, while the GPL only requires certain types of notices. This presents barriers to collaboration because a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together, thus utilizing one another's software features.
Distributions
* Belenix, LiveCD [http://www.belenix.org/]
* marTux, LiveCD/DVD [http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mbeinsx/marTux/], first distribution for SPARC
* Nexenta OS, Debian-based GNU/Solaris; LiveCD, VMware image, InstallCD
* Polaris, PowerPC port [http://polaris.blastwave.org/]
* 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's taking place February 2007 in Berlin, Germany. The OpenSolaris Developer Conference [http://www.osdevcon.org] is organized by the German Unix User Group (GUUG).
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