OpenSolaris is a project created by Sun Microsystems to create an open source version of their Solaris Operating Environment, a proprietary UNIX. The project s licensing terms are be analogous to Sun s selling proprietary StarOffice while also sponsoring the OpenOffice.org open source community. There are now over 8,500 members of [http://www.opensolaris.org OpenSolaris.org], of whom over 7,000 are external of Sun Microsystems.

The opening of Solaris has been an incremental process. The first portion of the Solaris codebase to be open sourced was the Dynamic Tracing Toolkit (commonly known as DTrace), a tracing tool for administrators and developers that aids in tuning a system for optimum performance and utilisation. The actual launch, in which the bulk of the Solaris 10 codebase was released, occurred on June 14 2005. There remains some code in Sun s Solaris distribution which is not open sourced, and only available in binary files. The source code which is available is not identical to Sun s current Solaris distribution, but is in fact a later development build.

Governance of the OpenSolaris project is provided by the CAB (Community Advisory Board). The CAB is composed of 5 members (2 appointed by Sun, 2 elected by the pilot community and 1 selected by Sun from the broader open source community).

The Community Advisory Board members are:

= License =

Sun has said it will release most of the Solaris source code under the new in January 2005.

= Criticism =

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Torvalds has since softened his position, commenting in February 2005 at the Enterprise Linux Summit [http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtmlarticleId=59300278] that the project s licensing terms were promising: ...CDDL is different. Everything is in place for it to work well. , although he went on to say A lot of people still like Solaris, but I m in active competition with them, and so I hope they die, .

= See also =

= External links =